Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  A mock battle between the Ottomans and Mamluks, graced with Suleyman’s presence, enabled ordinary Istanbulites to experience vicariously Selim I’s conquest of Egypt thirteen years earlier. The battle ended in a stalemate with the torching of each side’s fort, to the accompaniment of fireworks. (The Mamluk general was authentic, one Inal Beg, a former Circassian Mamluk now in Suleyman’s service.) The stalemate was only a teaser, it turned out, for overnight, two new forts were assembled. The next day’s victory, obviously an Ottoman one, culminated with a number of young males and females emerging from the fort of the vanquished as booty for the victors. (Did the royal mothers, or their sons on their behalf, react dubiously to this display of captive taking?) The eighth and ninth days featured music and dance (by males dressed as females), while army and navy recruits vied to retrieve prizes that were suspended from greased poles known as “circumcision candles.”

  In the days between their appearance at the Hippodrome and their circumcision, Mustafa, Mehmed, and perhaps even Selim most likely attended some events, seated beside their father in his splendid tent. It would be their formal introduction to the constitution of the empire’s government, with its two fundamental elements, din ve devlet (religion and state). The fifteenth day belonged to the devlet—a banquet for numerous men of state, including current and former viziers, the governors of the original two Ottoman provinces of Anatolia and Rumelia (the Balkan region), the military judges of the same two honored provinces, and Suleyman’s old preceptor Hayreddin.

  Present also were the son of the vassal Crimean khan and scions of three eastern dynasties—the Akkoyunlu, Mamluk, and Dulkadir—defeated by Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim, and Suleyman, respectively. Though apparently invited guests, were these princes, hostages to the past, meant to serve as symbolic minions to Suleyman’s sons? If so, the banquet also made clear that these Muslim princes were descended from worthy if defunct royal lineages. Scorn was reserved in these years for the shi`i Safavid empire of Iran. Heretics in Ottoman eyes, the rival Safavids were conspicuously excluded in this festival from the family of Muslim rulers.

  The sixteenth day was given over to din, religion, in the form of discussion among prominent Muslim scholars. With the chief mufti and Hayreddin as their escorts and Suleyman himself the presiding referee, the scholars engaged in debate on a topic posed by the sultan: the Fatiha, first chapter of the Qur`an. The less able “drowned in the sea of their sweat,” as Ibrahim Peçevi, a seventeenth-century historian, put it.9 One gentleman, mortified by his sudden loss of words, suffered an attack of apoplexy and expired upon reaching home. This story became a staple of future Ottoman historians’ accounts of the grand celebration of 1530.

  There were at least two lessons for Roxelana’s and Mahidevran’s sons to take away from their public initiation. First, they must learn to reign as well as govern, to conduct themselves as effectively in a Hippodrome festival as in a council meeting or in war. The celebration had demonstrated Suleyman’s mastery of the visual and the spatial aspects of managing one’s “presence”—the selective exhibition of the royal body. The princes were surely aware of the magnetism exerted by their own display.

  The second lesson could be summed up as liberality for loyalty. A sovereign could not expect his subjects, high or low, to trust and serve him if he did not share the fruits of empire. The circumcision festivities were merely a more conspicuous example of this ancient principle of sound government. By making the Hippodrome the stage for the gift of his family’s presence and the revelry that accompanied it, Suleyman revived a long-standing tradition in the imperial city. Originally built as a circus arena by the Roman emperor Septimus Severus at the end of the second century C.E., the Hippodrome had been the Byzantines’ venue for chariot races, the public proclamation of new emperors, and the “triumphs” that celebrated their military victories. As Suleyman reinvigorated the practice of entertaining the populace of the great capital city, he broadcast a distinctly Ottoman style.

  Mustafa was now poised to take these lessons to the provinces, but Suleyman did not award him a governorship for three more years. Not until the winter of 1533 did the prince and his mother depart for Manisa, when it made political sense for Mustafa to graduate to a provincial post. Suleyman had just concluded negotiations for a peace treaty with the Hapsburgs and was now free to plan his first eastern venture, a major campaign against the Safavids. With the western front quiet for the moment and the twelve-year-old prince Mehmed his father’s deputy in the capital, Mustafa’s presence in Anatolia would help to keep that chronically fractious region under control as the Ottoman army marched toward distant Iran. For his part, the prince was doubtless eager to begin his public career.

  In the popular version of Roxelana’s history that would come to depict her as ruthlessly determined to eliminate all rivals in her path, she engineers Mahidevran’s banishment from Istanbul to Manisa. The two women may well have been eager to put distance between themselves, but it was political tradition, not scheming on Roxelana’s part, that sent Mahidevran into the field as mother to a provincial governor. Once in Manisa, Mustafa and Mahidevran would take up residence in their old home, together with their newly assembled entourages. For her part, Mahidevran was no doubt delighted that her son was finally head of his own household and she now in charge of its female court. As Hafsa had monitored Mahidevran in her early years at Suleyman’s consort, she would look after the young women in Mustafa’s harem. One of his charges was to assume the responsibility of bringing more Ottoman princes and princesses into the world.

  Shortly before leaving Istanbul, Mustafa was again the object of public attention—this time on the occasion of his investiture as governor. The ceremony, which took place on February 9, was the first occasion when Mustafa stood alone to represent the public face of the Ottoman dynasty. The Venetian Pietro Zen, seasoned envoy to Istanbul and currently vice ambassador, happened to be in the New Palace that day. Mustafa was received in an assembly of the full Imperial Council, where his father awaited him, wrote Zen in his dispatch. The prince was escorted there by “the whole world”—the head “guard of the gate,” top official in the New Palace, and all the inner-palace functionaries.10

  Mustafa then proceeded to demonstrate his fealty by kissing his father’s hand, whereupon the grand vizier Ibrahim placed a robe of honor on his shoulders. To the second vizier Ayas Pasha belonged the privilege of holding Mustafa’s stirrup as he mounted the horse on which he would exit the imperial palace. These actions underlined the point that the sultan’s most important advisers now also served this potential heir to the throne. On the other hand, it was a limited degree of political authority that the New Palace ceremony transferred to Mustafa. Subordinate, like all Ottoman governors, to the sultan’s authority, the prince had an additional check on his autonomy in the lala appointed by Suleyman to tutor his son in statecraft.

  If the investment formalities were a closed political affair, Mustafa’s progress to and from his father’s palace was not. Unless his mother Mahidevran had already departed for Manisa, she would travel with him as their train wound its way across the capital and paraded out through one of the several gates in the monumental city walls. The Ottoman public now had a new royal generation to follow.

  MUSTAFA’S DEPARTURE WITH his mother for Manisa removed one of the three top-ranking royal women from the capital. With Mahidevran gone, Roxelana became the second most significant woman in the Old Palace (Hafsa continued to preside over the large household). In this “seraglio of the women,” noted de’Ludovici, “[there] reside both the female slaves of the Gran Signore and his unmarried female relatives.” His report put their numbers at “perhaps six hundred.”11 A fair portion of that number was devoted to the care of Roxelana and her five children. Their suite of apartments and its small army of servants, minders, and teachers occupied ample physical space as well as budgetary volume.

  When the eighteen-year-old Mustafa left Istanbul, his younger half siblings ranged in age
from twelve to two. Mehmed, Suleyman and Roxelana’s firstborn, was too young for a provincial post, but he was nearing the age when Ottoman princes had sometimes been thrust into the political arena. The boy perhaps had mixed feelings about his older brother’s graduation to the world of politics—he might miss Mustafa, but now he, Mehmed, would step into the position of oldest prince in the capital and perhaps become a new favorite of the Janissaries. Mihrumah, approaching her eleventh birthday, was the only little princess in the palace. She must have been its darling, although perhaps the toughness she would exhibit in later years was beginning to show. Selim, soon to be nine, no doubt had a sense of his own status as prince, having been included in the 1530 celebration. He would be easy to spot among the siblings because of the reddish hair that he perhaps inherited from his Ruthenian grandparents.

  The death of Roxelana’s fourth child, Abdullah (the precise date is unknown), left a gap between the oldest three, so close in age, and their two younger brothers, Bayezid and Cihangir. Six or seven years old at Mustafa’s departure (his birth date is also unclear), Bayezid would understand something of the reason for his oldest brother’s elevation. Cihangir, a mere toddler, probably had not yet sorted out the complexities of just who Mustafa was.

  Cihangir would be the last of Suleyman’s children. The sultan turned forty in August 1533, five months after he placed Mustafa in the field. The timing of the prince’s political inauguration was not coincidental. Forty was a number replete with religious, mythical, and historical significance for the Ottomans. For men, it was universally thought to be the threshold of full maturity. In Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad was forty when he received the first of the revelations brought to him by the archangel Gabriel. In premodern times, the realities of the average person’s life span meant that a forty-year-old man was probably head of an extended family in which he and his wife were counting their own children’s children. Suleyman’s age was easy for his subjects to calculate if they remembered the year of his birth, 900, in the Islamic calendar. The beginning of a new Islamic century was thought to be a moment when a great leader might emerge.

  Roxelana herself was still relatively young in 1533, probably in her late twenties at Cihangir’s birth two years earlier, almost certainly no more than thirty. But it would not be seemly to make a man who could now anticipate his first grandchild a father all over again. If decorum brought an end to her childbearing career, Roxelana may not have regretted leaving behind a phase of her life during almost half of which she had been pregnant. With five royal children to prepare for adulthood, she had her hands more than full. The end of childbearing did not spell the end of a sexual relationship between Roxelana and Suleyman, however. The sultan had apparently been unable to stay away from his favorite, and nothing suggests that their intimacy did not continue. And now it would be freed of the physical encumbrance of pregnancy.

  But how did the couple keep from conceiving more children? It is fair to say that without the practice of birth control, the Ottoman sultanate could not have evolved the highly engineered politics of reproduction that it sustained. In the opinion of the majority of Muslim jurists, abortion in the first trimester was acceptable if the birth of a child would bring physical harm to the mother or hardship to the family.12 The Old Palace midwives and female doctors were doubtless experts not only in conception and childbirth but also in forms of birth control that were compatible with the needs of the imperial household.

  A variety of abortifacients and contraceptive techniques were known and had been catalogued already in medieval times. Use of suppositories and tampons by females predominated. Among the prescriptions of Al-Razi were five for intravaginal suppositories that used oil from cabbage flowers, pepper, juice of peppermint, leaves of pennyroyal, and dill.13 Known to western tradition as Rhazes, the great Persian philosopher was also head of the Baghdad hospital, cutting-edge for its time, and a practicing physician. Roxelana herself was by now probably familiar with the palace’s recommended techniques, or so her slower rate of childbirth from 1526 on suggests.

  Dynastic family planning was political planning. The personal decision of how many children to have and when was fraught with political consequence in the Ottoman dynastic family. Too many sons was a liability, as Suleyman had observed all too closely in the bitter rivalry between his uncles and his father. Even before their deadly showdown, he had watched Selim chafing at his confinement in Trabzon while his seven brothers and then their sons gained princely posts closer to the capital.

  In 1533, Suleyman had four sons eligible to succeed him: Mustafa, Mehmed, Selim, and Bayezid. We can safely presume that Suleyman and Roxelana deliberated the question of whether or not to have more children. Both would recognize that the birth of yet another boy would only add more grief to the spectacle of their sons combating one another, let alone Mustafa. Four healthy sons was sufficient dynastic insurance, one more than Mehmed the Conqueror had provided. The public introduction of the three eldest princes at the 1530 circumcision celebration may have been intended in part to signal that the sultan considered his reproductive obligation to the empire fulfilled. A late baby, Cihangir was perhaps unanticipated or an afterthought—the result of a decision by Roxelana and Suleyman to have one last child.

  THE FIRST IN a series of tectonic shifts in imperial politics occurred in the spring of 1534. On March 19, Suleyman’s beloved mother passed away. Hafsa was probably in her early sixties when she died, older than Bragadin’s report of 1526 suggested (“a very beautiful woman of forty-eight, for whom [Suleyman] bears great reverence and love”14). While Ottoman writers generally avoided mention of women, the prominence of the sultan’s mother called for a memorial salute. A long tribute was paid by Suleyman’s private secretary and chancellor Celalzade Mustafa in his panegyric history of his sultan’s reign.

  In the florid prose then employed by men of the pen, Celalzade wrote of the torrents of tears that poured forth when people learned of Hafsa’s death. (He gave facts as well—that Hafsa was buried next to the tomb of Selim I, that a tomb of her own was constructed over her grave, and that Qur`an reciters were posted within it.)15 In his early seventeenth-century history, Ibrahim Peçevi paid the ultimate tribute of likening Hafsa to the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and his beloved wife Aisha: “The mother of the monarch, refuge of the world, the great woman whose whole work was piety, the [pure] woman whose every thought was good, the Fatima of the time, the Aisha of the age.”16

  Hafsa was the ideal model of a royal concubine and mother. She had labored for the empire for nearly forty years, apparently with dignity and determination. Freed by Islamic law on the death of her master, Selim I, Hafsa raised the position of queen mother to new prominence and may have been the first addressed with the title Valide Sultan (royal mother). The mosque she built in Manisa made visible her special status. It was the first commissioned by a woman of the dynastic family to have two minarets, and the charitable complex it anchored acquired a lofty appellation—Sultaniye (the imperial). Hafsa’s duties included staying apprised of political developments within and beyond the empire, for which she maintained her own network of informers. For instance, when Suleyman was fighting in southern Austria in 1532, she dispatched her kira—a Jewish woman traditionally employed as an intermediary by harem women—to get the latest news on troop movements from the Venetian ambassador.17

  As Selim’s concubine and Suleyman’s mother, Hafsa came to know a good deal of the empire. She lived in Trabzon, Caffa, Manisa, Adrianople, and Istanbul and traveled vast stretches of the territory that lay along the routes among these far-flung cities. Probably from the northern Black Sea region, Hafsa was later rumored to be royalty, daughter of the Crimean khan, but she was almost certainly an ordinary if beautiful girl who entered history as an imperial slave. Hafsa became a wealthy woman, but the privileged luxury she enjoyed had come at the cost of many lives as Selim defeated his internal and external foes. Out of compassion or duty, she cared for the progeny o
f at least one of her unsuccessful counterparts, Gulruh, mother of a failed prince. Perhaps the people of Istanbul who mourned her passing understood something of the trauma and triumph that had fueled her career.

  Hafsa’s death marked the end of the old regime, although it was not immediately apparent to all. Within two months of her passing, Roxelana and Suleyman were married. Addressing the Venetian Senate on June 3, 1534, de’Ludovici delivered the news that “the Gran-Signore has married [the Russian], as his wife.”18 Given that the return journey from Istanbul to Venice could take a month or more, the marriage had likely taken place by early May.

  Roxelana had apparently gained her freedom at some point before becoming Suleyman’s spouse. Then, following her marriage to the sultan, she gradually took up residence in the New Palace, the first royal woman ever to do so. Manumission, marriage, the opening of harem quarters in the previously all-male palace—each development was a radical move, each shattered Ottoman precedent. A whole new position was coming into being in the Ottoman empire that can only be called the office of queen.

  One might expect Ottoman pundits to recognize these major transformations at the imperial center and mark them with clear dates. Instead, the puzzling silence of the historical record raises questions. Why did the marriage happen at that time? Had Roxelana pushed for the alteration in her status? Why did the marriage not become public immediately? When could it be said that Roxelana actually lived in the New Palace? Did the children move with her from the Old Palace? And could it be that the mystery regarding dates was in fact intentional?