Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

IF THE DIVAN Hall generated the energy of the second courtyard, the large portal that separated it from the third, innermost domain dominated architecturally. The very name of this structure, the Gate of Good Fortune, signaled that one was about to encounter the essence of empire. The rich Ottoman vocabulary of gates, doors, and thresholds reflected respect for the integrity of interior spaces, inherited in part from Byzantine precedent, in part from Near Eastern royal tradition.

  Good fortune, saadet, was a resonant term among the Ottomans. Derived from Arabic, it approximated the old Turkish concept of kut, the divine grant of sovereignty that had legitimated the rule of eastern and central Asian khans before the arrival of Islam among the Turks. In the Ottoman view, the sultan’s palace enshrined this blessing of sovereignty. The royal residence was often referred to as Dar ul-Saadet—House of Good Fortune—and so sometimes was Istanbul, whose aura of greatness came from the presence in it of the monarch and his residence. Kut and saadet both carried connotations of happiness, luck, fortune, and destiny. Westerners attempted to capture these meanings in phrases such as Sublime Porte or Gate of Felicity.

  A major goal of Ibrahim and Suleyman’s program of renovation was to make the interior palace as magnificent as its public and semipublic sections. The time had apparently come to bring the imperial residence in line with the empire’s growing power in the world. The opulence of the redesign, however, also reflected the grandiose ambitions of Ibrahim and Suleyman. The monarch would become more august and less accessible, while the grand vizier would represent him in splendid array. To be sure, the selective seclusion of the sultan was not a new idea: in the imperial protocols he issued, Mehmed the Conqueror had passed official judgement, for example, on who was sufficiently distinguished to sup with him. Ibrahim and Suleyman’s effort to further elevate the ruler’s person was manifested in the upgrading of the Chamber of Petitions, a throne room that lay immediately beyond the Gate of Good Fortune. Here the sultan received only the highest dignitaries: important ambassadors, the chief mufti, and the grand vizier. The 1520s renovations added marble columns, wall mosaics of azure and gold, a silver fireplace, a throne studded with jewels, and more.

  Beyond this last link with the world of politics lay the private universe of the Ottoman sultan. Situated in the inner courtyard’s far left corner was the Privy Chamber. Selim’s only significant contribution to the palace was the remodeling of these royal apartments. Suleyman’s contribution was to reinforce and enhance the terrace that looked out over their hanging garden.23 In situating his new palace on the acropolis, Mehmed the Conqueror had provided himself and his descendants with magnificent views. From the private garden the sultan could see all four districts of the capital, the Asian as well as the European (Istanbul and the “three boroughs” of Galata, Eyüp, and Üsküdar). Also visible was the conjunction of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, the two bodies of water that linked the Black Sea and Mediterranean sea. The intersection of these waters confirmed that Mehmed was indeed “lord of the two seas and master of the two lands,” a title that he had arrogated to himself.

  It is worth dwelling on Suleyman’s refinements to the Privy Chamber terrace, for the architectural enhancements appear to carry a romantic subtext. The garden gate that linked Suleyman’s quarters to Roxelana’s suggests that he shared with her the delights of the terrace. At the same time that the “splendid” chambers were rising up on the female side of the gate, Suleyman was embellishing the terrace with new marble paving, a kiosk (the familiar haven of leisure and contemplation preferred by the sultans), and a room adjacent to a small bath.24 Even if it was only the view that Roxelana would experience from this inner sanctum of power, it was an awesome vista for a former peasant from Ruthenia. But let us respect the taboo on breaking into the privacy of the inner courtyard and leave Roxelana and Suleyman to their pleasures.

  In contrast to the second courtyard’s dedication to the public good, the perimeter of the third, innermost, courtyard was occupied by structures that served the dynastic family. In the far-right corner was the imperial treasury (separate from the public treasury housed in the second courtyard). It was a great stronghold whose four chambers were stocked with the riches of the sultanate—among them thrones (including that of Ismail the Safavid, plundered by Selim) and the revenues of the rich province of Egypt. But the most remarkable feature of this secluded court was the conglomerate of buildings devoted to training the most promising of male slave recruits for high government office. Even in the sultan’s most private domain, it seemed, the personal could not escape the political. The royal pages of the New Palace had been assessed and judged to possess more aptitude than the majority of male recruits, who were routed to other, secondary training institutions or directly into the corps of the military. The quarters of these slaves in training comprised five chambers occupying two sides of the courtyard.

  Approximately five hundred such youths were said to be living and studying in the inner palace in 1534, the year of Roxelana’s arrival next door.25 The curriculum devised by Mehmed II perfected its students’ bodies and minds, trained their hands in a vocational skill, and gave their tongues facility in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.26 Around 1577, by which time the French had gained knowledge of the Ottomans on a par with the Venetians’, the French humanist Blaise de Vigenère commented, “It should be understood, first of all, that the whole establishment of the sultan’s court, the foundation of his empire, and the strength of his army, depend upon a permanent seminary of young boys.”27

  The most accomplished of the pages were honored by selection for personal service to the sultan in the Privy Chamber. Selim had raised their number from thirty-two to forty when he had improvements made to these apartments. Wherever the sultan went, the four most favored of this elite group accompanied him. Prior to elevating Ibrahim in 1523 to the grand vizierate directly from the inner household, Suleyman had singled out his male favorite by making him head of the Privy Chamber during the Rhodes campaign of 1522—after having already awarded him the head pageship during the 1521 Belgrade campaign. Pages who did not make it as far as the sultan’s personal suite had the consolation of knowing they were already among the chosen. Their continued loyalty and excellent performance, they were assured, would gain them other favors from their master. So foolproof was this system, it seemed, that Nicolò Machiavelli informed his Medici prince that one reason the Ottoman empire would be difficult to conquer was that the ministers, slaves, and dependents of the sultan could not be corrupted.

  In 1534, Roxelana was joining a New Palace made splendid through the efforts of Ibrahim and Suleyman. Its two inner courts broadcast the majesty of her husband to targeted audiences of present and future power brokers. Roxelana was the first woman to inhabit this charismatic space. With the passage of time she would gain recognition as the founder of a female establishment within the New Palace that paralleled the male establishment created by the Conqueror. Each housed preeminent members of the dynastic family in elegant surroundings, and each trained chosen candidates to serve the empire. Over the next hundred years, the new wing of the palace would grow greatly, both in physical expanse and in political influence. Although Roxelana’s grandson would establish rooms within it for his own use, it would remain a female-governed zone of the imperial residence. In the seventeenth century, it was from this wing of the palace that regent mothers would direct affairs of state in cooperation with their sons’ viziers. Their collaboration would resemble that of Suleyman and Ibrahim, with the exception of the different inner quarters inhabited by the queen mothers.

  Both the inner male and inner female spaces in the New Palace were referred to officially as harem-i hümayun (imperial harem). The comments of the early sixteenth-century historian Mehmed Neşri, as he described the construction of Mehmed the Conqueror’s two palaces, suggest what contemporaries understood by the term “harem”: “It is related that Sultan Mehmed first built in Istanbul a tower which he made into a treasury. And then he turned it i
nto a palace, which he surrounded with a harem in the manner of a castle. He made that his residence. Later, displeased with it, he had another castle built, he made it a harem, and within it he built glorious palaces and made it the seat of his sovereignty.”28

  Neşri uses “harem” to refer to the space created by enclosure within an impregnable wall. The Old Palace starts as a tower to house the gold and silver of the recently conquered capital; then it becomes a palace, but only when Mehmed makes it a guarded, fortified “castle” does the entire structure become a harem. Likewise the New Palace, the “seat of sovereignty,” is an interiorized space composed of a collection of residential and governmental “palaces.” The spaces that were home to the sultan, and now to his wife, were harems within a harem, so to speak.

  The Arabic roots of the word “harem” and its usage over time conveyed two general and clearly related meanings: a space that is forbidden or unlawful, and a space that has been declared sacred, inviolable, or taboo. A harem was a zone in which certain individuals or certain forms of conduct were forbidden—in other words, a kind of sanctuary. In the Ottoman world of the sixteenth century, the most revered spaces were known as harems—the interior of a mosque, the Muslim sacred compound in Jerusalem, and, above all, the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

  That the Ottomans characterized the zone surrounding the sultan as a harem reminds us of how they understood and assessed power—that one moved inward toward it, not upward. The rich Ottoman vocabulary of gates, doors, and thresholds demonstrated the charisma of interior spaces. But Suleyman’s majesty came from more than the royal privilege of remoteness. His Olympian remove was punctuated by public displays of splendor—the great Hippodrome festivals (Ibrahim’s wedding in 1523, the circumcision festival of 1530), his processions to the city’s mosques for Friday prayers, his departures for war, and his victorious reentries to the capital. The sultan was defined by his unique capacity to cross every significant threshold of the empire—from the inaccessible core of the palace through its successive walls to the public streets of Istanbul, through the ancient walls of the capital to the borders of his domains and beyond. His legitimacy was reinforced every time he plied the circuit from inner sanctuary to frontier and back.

  Roxelana was now generating a circuit of her own as she moved between her apartments in the Old and New Palaces. Since her person was invisible, the very fact of her mobility between the two imperial spaces communicated the new queen’s expanding orbit of authority. We do not know how often or how long Roxelana stayed in the Old Palace or whether her children moved between the two residences. But whatever the case, her familiarity with both royal households presented the opportunity to strengthen coordination between them.

  Although the sole woman of stature in the palace of men, Roxelana would understand much of the dynamics of its male harem from the fourteen years she had spent in the Old Palace. With their training regimes, their hierarchies of slave recruits, and their well-guarded interiors, the New and Old Palace harems deliberately resembled each other. Pages were as scrupulously monitored by their eunuch guards and their teachers as were the virgins of the Old Palace. Although New Palace males might be in their twenties when they “graduated out,” their sexual adulthood was latent. Intimate physical contact with their fellow trainees was strictly forbidden. Only when awarded public office could they demonstrate full masculinity by growing a beard—or so Europeans reported.29 Likewise, Old Palace trainees who had distinguished themselves gained sexual maturity when they graduated out—either to become the concubine of a sultan or prince or, more commonly, to be united with a New Palace graduate in marriage.

  Such unions were frequent and often the product of deliberate design. Bassano noted that Roxelana married her “damsels” to pages of the palace, some of whom succeeded in becoming “great personages.”30 As loyal satellites of the two Istanbul palaces, these new households played a critical role in propagating dynastic authority among the population. The parallel stipend scales of the female and male training establishments suggests that such marriages were considered unions of equals. According to the wage register kept for Suleyman’s princely household at Manisa, his pages received slightly less than the women in his harem.31 This slim edge enjoyed by females persisted: in 1664, the average page received a stipend of 8.5 silver aspers a day, while his female counterpart received 8.7 aspers (stipends in Suleyman’s day were less than half that).32

  NO SOONER HAD Roxelana become Suleyman’s wife than he left Istanbul for the confrontation with Iran, not to return for a year and seven months. This was not his first absence from her, but it was certainly the longest. During the five campaigns Suleyman had led so far, four in Europe and one in the Mediterranean, Roxelana had been surrounded by others in the Old Palace, sharing many of the daily routines that kept them all occupied. Now she faced the lot of a queen in an age of warring kings.

  While Suleyman had reason to want Roxelana to serve as his eyes and ears in the New Palace during his long sojourn, he may also have trusted her to keep watch over the Old Palace. After fourteen years of Hafsa’s government, it was without an obvious leader of royal stature. Admittedly, the institution could run on its own under the management of the Lady Steward, who administered the household of several hundred with the help of her female and eunuch staffs. But this imperial establishment did best when enhanced by a royal head. Roxelana may have cooperated in that role with one or more of Suleyman’s sisters. They were likely to be widows who returned to their original home upon the death of their husbands, either to stay or to leave again if remarried.

  It no doubt fell to Roxelana to organize at least some banquets and entertainments in the Old Palace, or at a minimum to attend them. Just a little over a week after Suleyman’s departure, Istanbul celebrated the Festival (or Feast) of the Sacrifice, one of the two most important religious holidays in the Islamic calendar. Commemorating the willingness of the prophet Abraham to comply with God’s command to sacrifice his son, the custom entailed the sacrifice of a sheep and the sharing of the meat with family, friends and neighbors, and the poor. To Muslims, Abraham is known as Ibrahim, and it is not Isaac but a different son, Ismail, whom the angel Gabriel instructs his father to spare. The religious festival would be an occasion when women of high rank—the wives of viziers and other notables—were invited to the Old Palace as honored guests. Etiquette called for those of lesser rank to attend those of greater rank. All these women presumably recognized and honored Roxelana’s elevated status.

  Gatherings that brought palace women together with women of elite households were more than social events. The wives of prominent Ottoman statesmen were very likely to be politically sophisticated and well informed. Some might themselves be products of an Old Palace education, perhaps already known to Roxelana, or alternatively of grandee households that prided themselves on the quality of their female and male slaves. (Recall that Roxelana herself may have come to Suleyman from such a household.) Others might be freeborn Muslims selected for Suleyman’s men because of their pedigree and the loyalty of their families to the sultanate.

  Like Roxelana, these women stayed abreast of the news by employing the networks available to them through servants and family clients. Especially if their husbands had joined the “government on horseback” in the east, they would be eager to learn whatever information the queen was willing to share and in turn impart any news of their own. While we lack explicit information about Roxelana’s other networks, she likely had several. With a range of suppliers and associates in the city, her steward might pry from them the latest street talk. Eunuchs in her service would transmit palace talk. No doubt they enjoyed their own networks stretching beyond the New Palace walls—the chief eunuch, for example, perhaps had a suburban villa as well as a residence near the sultan’s palace.

  From Hafsa, Roxelana had inherited a valuable asset in the network game: the female go-between who had assisted the queen mother in acquiring strategic information. Her name was
Strongila, or Stranhilla, as the French ambassador Antonio Rincon called her. Her family belonged to the Karaite Jewish community of Istanbul.33 This woman had presumably been in Hafsa’s service since the start of Suleyman’s reign, if not earlier, since some months after his accession she was rewarded with a grant of exemption from taxes as well as the right to own slaves (although not Muslim slaves). It was she whom Hafsa had dispatched in 1526 to seek information from the Venetian ambassador on Suleyman’s movements during the Hungarian campaign. Strongila eventually converted to Islam, acquiring the name Fatma Hanım (Lady Fatma).34 It is not clear if the practice of employing Jewish intermediaries originated with Hafsa, but it would continue at least until the end of the century.

  Last but certainly not least of Roxelana’s intermediaries was her eldest son. Mehmed had entrée, if circumscribed, into the world of men and politics. He may well have been present at meetings of the Imperial Council during his father’s absence. When Hayreddin Barbarossa, the famed Mediterranean corsair whom Suleyman made admiral of his navy in 1533, repulsed an attack by the Spanish and their allies, both Mehmed and Roxelana separately wrote Suleyman with the news. Which of them heard it first? Mehmed’s letter informed his father that the “infidel” fleet had attacked Hayreddin Pasha and that “with the aid of God, my sultan, he fought for the glory of your rule, defeated the enemy, captured one hundred eighty ships, and sank the rest.”35 Suleyman doubtless received the news independently, as soon as couriers could transmit it across Anatolia, but hearing it from his family may have had special value, both personal and political.

  ONLY THROUGH ROXELANA and to a certain extent his older children could Suleyman maintain touch with the intimacies of family life during his long separation. The welfare of the dynastic family was always a major political concern, and this was his first campaign without his mother’s trusted communications from the capital. But unless he specifically asked for news of his wife, it was taboo for others to mention her in their communications to him. The arrival of a letter from Roxelana, delivered to him in the sumptuous tent that was his home away from home, was surely an anticipated pleasure.