Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  The concubine mothers of the four children were already acquainted with one another from their time in Manisa. A government in miniature, Suleyman’s princely household included family, servants, teachers, cooks, courtiers, bookkeepers, soldiers and officers, and the myriad other personnel who composed the entourage of an heir to the throne. Except for a basic staff and military guard that remained in the Manisa palace, his court moved with him to the capital. Once in Istanbul, the sexes separated, men to the New Palace, women to the Old Palace, eunuchs to both. There their numbers expanded, as new slaves arrived to fill out the two royal residences. The mothers of Suleyman’s children doubtless wondered which, if any, of the new female recruits might rise to their own status.

  Among this small elite was Mahidevran, who had traveled from Manisa with her son Mustafa. When tragedy struck in October 1521, taking the toddler Murad and then Mahmud and his sister, apparently the victims of an epidemic, Mahidevran’s stature rose. Only Hafsa outranked her. But with the birth of a new baby boy of her own in the fall of 1521, Roxelana became Mahidevran’s rival for the sultan’s attention. At least for the moment—there was the possibility, even the likelihood, that Suleyman would answer the sudden need to produce more princes with new concubines.

  AS ROXELANA’S FORTUNES rose from slave to concubine to royal mother, she almost certainly encountered one or more of the sultan’s six sisters. By the time she arrived in the Old Palace, all the sisters had been married. Since the reign of Suleyman’s grandfather, it had been Ottoman practice to give princesses in marriage to the sultan’s top statesmen. These were the pashas who served alternately as military commanders and governors of Ottoman provinces and ultimately, if their work was exemplary, as viziers and members of the Imperial Council through which the sultan ran his empire. These royal sons-in-law were nearly all products of the New Palace training regime or its smaller-scale replica in a prince’s household. Most had begun their career as a personal attendant to the sultan or one of his sons.

  The rich households formed by the union of a princess and a statesman functioned as satellites of the great dynastic establishment in the capital. A princess could live at quite a distance from Istanbul if her husband were dispatched to govern a frontier region. His periodic summons to the capital, however, provided opportunity for his wife to visit home and show off her children. The festive receptions that greeted her were doubtless welcome breaks in the daily routine of the palace. To the Old Palace family, princesses were beloved daughters, sisters, and aunts. They were also surely objects of pride and affection for the female staff and eunuchs who had helped raise them.

  Less joyful were the reunions that took place when a widowed princess returned with her children to the Old Palace. Widowhood was a stark liability of marriage to a pasha, who might be considerably older than his bride. Moreover, he ran the risk of death in battle. But a widow’s stay in the Old Palace might be short-lived if she was still of marriageable age, for she could be given to another pasha, subjecting her all over again to the same uncertainties. A second marriage could work out well though, as it did for Suleyman’s granddaughter Shah Sultan. After the death of her first husband, she married one Zal Mahmud at the age of thirty. So suited were husband and wife, it was said, that they fell ill simultaneously, lay together in their deathbed, and expired at the very same moment.

  The gravest risk for a princess was that her husband might be found guilty of violating the empire’s laws, which was tantamount to betraying his monarch. Execution was the punishment, the sentence of death the sultan’s to give. Suleyman’s sister Beyhan was so outraged when he ordered the beheading of her husband Ferhad Pasha that she not only refused to remarry but chose to live in self-exile away from Istanbul. Accused of rapacious and bloody conduct as a governor in eastern Anatolia, Ferhad had already received a second chance through Hafsa’s and Beyhan’s pleas. Reports of repeated abuses in his new post on the Danube, however, sealed his fate.14

  The Venetian ambassador Bragadin reported that Hafsa was greatly grieved by the execution, no doubt out of concern for Beyhan and her children.15 Thought by some to have been Beyhan’s mother, Hafsa was surely torn between the princess’s anguish and a queen mother’s recognition of the need for justice, lest her son be perceived as weak or negligent. A reality of Ottoman rule—that policy and security trumped family bonds—was no less brutal for being shared with other sixteenth-century monarchies, such as that of England’s Henry VIII or Muscovy’s Ivan IV, “the Terrible.”

  Roxelana was doubtless privy to the news of Ferhad’s demise and perhaps witness to Beyhan’s angry grief. By 1524, the year Ferhad was executed, she had become a figure of importance in the Old Palace. Once Suleyman had bedded his new concubine, sometime in the first half year of his reign, she became gözde, “in the eye of the sultan,” someone of account. Her presence at the various receptions and entertainments sponsored by ranking women of the palace was now expected, and soon she would be responsible for providing such amenities in her own suite of rooms for her growing circle of attendants and allies.

  News from Istanbul and beyond passed from ear to ear in the Old Palace, as did local harem gossip, but formal gatherings were venues where certain kinds of information—the Ottoman victory over the Hungarians, the rupture between Beyhan and Suleyman—could be relayed to those who needed to know. As she rose from gözde to concubine mother of one, two, and then more children, Roxelana rapidly became one of the “need to know” elite. The Old Palace was hardly sealed off from politics, as modern stereotypes of royal harems so often presume. It was politics, and it taught politics. Foreign envoys were wholly correct to consider the harem a vital object of diplomatic intelligence, for it generated its own news and even its own scandals.

  Life in the Old Palace was not all parties and policy, however. Instruction took up much of the daily routine, especially for new personnel. The teaching was supervised by the Lady Steward. This powerful majordomo and her staff organized training protocols that sorted out new recruits: promising girls with the talent to join the suites of high-ranking women, others who showed a flair for administration, and the rest, whose lesser aptitude or beauty suggested lesser modes of service.

  No one was exempt from instruction, however. Giovanni Maria Angiolello, a Venetian captive who served in the household of a son of Mehmed II, described the training regime to which all were subject but at which only some excelled: “The most senior [women], who are accomplished, teach the new and unrefined to speak and read, and instruct them in the Muhammadan law, and also teach them to sew and embroider, and to play the harp and to sing. They instruct them in all their ceremonies and customs, to the degree that [these girls] have the inclination to learn.”16

  The arts of the needle were a universal talent of women in the sixteenth century.17 For the women of the Old Palace, needlework was, if nothing else, a means of survival. Should they fall on hard times—having been expelled from the royal home for misconduct, say, or retired when the reign of the sultan they served ended—they had a marketable skill to fall back on. Ottaviano Bon, Venetian ambassador in the early seventeenth century, noted that retired palace women could generate income by selling their handiwork to Jewish tradeswomen.18 These female entrepreneurs were valuable intermediaries between the outside world and palace women. The well connected among them could even act as political liaisons for high-ranking women—for example, the woman Strongila, who served Hafsa in this capacity and whose services Roxelana inherited following Hafsa’s death.

  Needlework instruction was taken with utmost seriousness. According to Giovanni Antonio Menavino, a Genoese who served Suleyman’s father and grandfather, ten teachers of embroidery came every morning to the Old Palace. Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, Guillaume Postel, French diplomat and scholar of languages, claimed that instruction was restricted to the bulk of recruits who, for “lack of beauty and grace,” would not rise to higher status. These women were nevertheless trained with such care, he observed,
that one would think they were the sultan’s own daughters.19 Postel was not entirely correct in presuming that only the less talented received instruction. Roxelana herself would acquire sufficient expertise with a needle to send richly embroidered gifts to the king of Poland.

  WHY WERE ITALIAN and French audiences hearing about palace women’s devotion to needlework? Was the emphasis on industriousness and sobriety in these European writings an effort to counteract popular European stereotypes of harem wantonness? The question is significant since it was European observers and writers, not the Ottomans themselves, who helped to shape their contemporaries’ ideas of Roxelana by reporting openly about life behind palace walls. Always an object of great curiosity, the sultan’s “seraglio” and its women sold books and generated translations of best sellers from one language to another. Later, in the seventeenth century, when Ottoman armies had proved stoppable and Europeans could feel superior, the theme of the sultan’s lasciviousness and the decadence of empire grew popular.

  When Angiolello, Menavino, and Postel were writing, however, the fascination with the Ottomans was more innocent and more comprehensive. The panoptic title of Menavino’s publication Five Books on the Laws, Religion, and Way of Life of the Turks, on the Court, and on Some Wars of the Grand Turk reflected the thirst for knowledge of all things Ottoman. It was a time of both curiosity about and dread of the Ottoman military machine. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was not that far in the past; nor was the Ottoman threat that far away. In 1480, Mehmed the Conqueror’s forces had briefly occupied Otranto, on the heel of Italy’s boot, a short sail from Ottoman-controlled territory on the Adriatic. Only his death nine months later muted fears that the empire was bent on a quest for Rome, the “golden apple” of Ottoman legend.

  At least in Roxelana’s time, European fascination with the court of the “Grand Turk” and the lives of its females probably owed less to a lurid interest in the sultan’s sex life and more to a shared appreciation that palaces and the monarchs who lived in them were the heart of the matter of sovereignty. Suleyman’s contemporary Francis I replaced the crumbling structures within the medieval fortress of the Louvre with a splendid Renaissance palace, installing there the foundations of what would become the French monarchy’s great art collection. The founder of England’s celebrated Tudor dynasty, Henry VII, spent lavishly on his new Richmond Palace, its finishing touches applied just in time for display at the event that crowned his foreign policy—the marriage of his oldest son Arthur to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. Europeans also took for granted the elaborate separate quarters in which royal women presided over their own courts. In this light, their scrutiny of the domestic education of Old Palace women was not so remarkable. And until Roxelana’s rise to power and notoriety, news of the mundane was probably the best harem news that observers could muster.

  For its time, the Old Palace was a veritable institution of higher learning for women. It was the one place in the empire that offered a systematic education for large numbers of females. And it was international in its makeup, commingling individuals from Asia, Europe, and Africa. A new resident need not search far in this Tower of Babel to find another who could speak or at least understand her language. Everyone, of course, had to acquire fluency in Turkish, but other tongues were doubtless spoken in private. Friendships and alliances could be struck through shared vernaculars. Mothers, governesses, and wet nurses, especially young ones with imperfect Turkish, perhaps soothed royal infants with their own childhood lullabies. With a mother and a grandmother whose native tongue was not Turkish, a royal child might acquire a smattering of another language or two.

  The Old Palace was, in today’s terminology, a multiethnic and multilingual institution where all were dedicated to mastering a new, shared culture of refinement. It was not wholly unlike European courts that attracted the daughters of ambitious noble families or even royalty. Such was the court of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, where Roxelana’s contemporary Anne Boleyn began to acquire her sophistication, or the French court, where Anne continued as lady-in-waiting in the queen’s household and Mary Stuart, widow to a French king and queen of Scotland, received a Renaissance education. The difference was that the Old Palace did not provide an education for women of notable Ottoman families. Rather, it created an educated female elite from a population of slaves, albeit a highly select one.

  While the Old Palace regime provided its female pupils with the training as well as the opportunity to advance in royal service, its goal was equally to inculcate total allegiance to the empire that had torn them from their homes. Was this careful attention to nurture aimed at uprooting their native cultures as well? Certainly it was imperative to steep recruits, male and female alike, in the religion, etiquette, and political ideology they would now represent. But though it may seem counterintuitive, it was by deliberate design that it was the youth of Christian towns and villages who were drafted into high Ottoman service rather than the seemingly more culturally compatible children of Muslims.

  TO BE SURE, the choice to surround the royal family with skilled converts was influenced by the teaching that a Muslim cannot enslave another Muslim. But the Ottoman sultanate did not hesitate to ignore the parallel teaching that a Muslim (monarchs included) cannot enslave a Christian or a Jew living under a Muslim government. While large numbers of imperial slaves came through legally approved sources—prisoners of war, purchased slaves of non-Ottoman origin—others came from the sultan’s own territories, particularly from frontier provinces. Such slaves were a kind of human tax levied on the empire’s Christian subjects.

  The rationale most historians have offered for building the sultanic household with converted Christian slaves is that it bred loyalty. Severed from their homelands, the dynasty’s slaves were completely dependent on its largesse. In turn, they could expect reward for devoted service, especially the talented among them. Exceptional service garnered exceptional reward—riches, influence, and a fancy household of one’s own, all worlds apart from what was imaginable in one’s homeland. Flawed service like that of Ferhad, on the other hand, was rewarded with exile or execution. Under this system it was less risky for an Ottoman ruler to punish an uprooted slave than it was for kings and emperors elsewhere to discipline their noble servants without alienating powerful families.

  The sultans had learned from their own struggles with aristocrats. The troubled early fifteenth century taught them about the unreliability of foreign vassal princes and, more dangerous, the dubious loyalties of native Turkish princes who had submitted to Ottoman rule. The nascent empire was nearly wiped out in 1402 when these presumed allies fled the battlefield at Ankara in the disastrous confrontation between Bayezid I and the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane). It took over a decade of violence for one of the dead sultan’s sons, Mehmed I, to reunite the Ottoman territories.

  For Mehmed II, the real architect of government by slave converts, this was all recent history. Born in 1432, “the Conqueror” grew up with knowledge of Bayezid I’s humiliating defeat and the subsequent rise of pretenders who rallied discontented Ottoman subjects to their banners, challenging his grandfather’s and then his father’s hold on the newly recovered throne. Mehmed diluted this troublesome structure by making convert Christians the backbone of his administration. As one element in this policy, foreign princesses were no longer taken as wives by Ottoman sultans and princes.

  But the critical importance of loyalty to the dynasty still does not explain why the slave pool was so international. What the Ottomans were looking for—a broad knowledge base—could not be supplied by seeking slaves only from the empire’s own heartlands or from its immediate frontiers. As a state propelled by conquest, at least through the greater part of Suleyman’s reign, the empire kept adding new territories and, with them, new ways of life—languages, economies, modes of worship, cultural traditions. It also kept coming up against new rival powers across advancing frontiers. In such a kaleidoscopic world, it
was politically expedient to assemble polyglot cadres who could literally speak with inhabitants of the provinces they might be sent to govern or negotiate with governments the Ottomans might want to trade or make peace with. In the case of the New Palace training school, the underlying principle seemed to be that a mélange of borderland recruits with a richly diverse talent pool would make for good military strategy and good foreign policy. In the case of the female harem of the Old Palace, the assumption seemed to be that a diverse gene pool through which the dynasty continually hybridized the world around it made for monarchs adept at managing an empire on three continents.

  Did Roxelana feel torn between two worlds? If a royal concubine ever saw her family again, we do not hear of it. This is not to say that Roxelana and her fellow harem residents forgot their native lands or never spoke of them. The polyglot universe of the Ottoman ruling class probably encouraged new recruits to gravitate toward others who spoke their language. It was an obvious survival tactic to seek solidarity, protection, or guidance in making one’s way in this astonishing new world. On the other hand, memories of home might recede, especially for those who were children at the time of their capture. Occasions to reminisce, if any, were probably privately shared moments.

  If longing for home and worry over the fate of her family clouded Roxelana’s efforts to adapt, if she feared that her diligence as a new Muslim betrayed her childhood faith, if memory of her abduction dogged her determination to keep that smiling countenance, she could draw some consolation from the fact that she was not alone in the struggle. Everyone was a convert, everyone learned a new tongue, everyone strove to please, and everyone had to forget. The rigor of the Old Palace educational program was surely a blessing in disguise. It organized new recruits into groups, and it kept them busy. The training system into which Roxelana was thrust was a meritocracy where the capacity to compete was what spelled success. Its encouragement of talent focused the more ambitious on advancement—on the future, not the past.