Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  As a kind of postscript to the lengthy, stylized core of her letters, Roxelana typically added a paragraph or two of quotidian news. Whether the result of her imperfect (although increasingly fluent) Turkish or simply her personal style, Roxelana’s letters are not always easy to follow. Mehmed’s writing was more sophisticated, but then he had been schooled in the arts of language from the time he was little. Roxelana’s writing tends to be cryptic, its ambiguities and ellipses arising in part because the letters are an ongoing epistolary conversation between wife and husband. The obvious gaps confirm that only some of Roxelana’s letters to Suleyman have survived.

  The health of their youngest son Cihangir, who suffered from a deformity of his shoulder, was apparently a serious preoccupation of his parents, since Roxelana wrote of it in the two surviving letters sent during the Iran expedition. In one, she describes a successful medical procedure that involved application of a plaster or salve to his shoulder, followed by what appears to be the surgical removal of a cyst. Cihangir is now improved, and Roxelana urges Suleyman not to lapse in his prayers for the boy. She has less good news about “the hodja [teacher],” possibly Suleyman’s esteemed childhood preceptor, Hayreddin. He is “a virtual corpse,” she writes, “neither dead nor alive,” due to his great difficulty breathing. “No one but God knows his condition.”

  Roxelana’s letters make clear that management of her new residential domain apparently presented some challenges. She may not yet have achieved finesse in handling her monies in general, or at least Suleyman had some concern about her ability to do so. Back in 1526, he had appealed to Gulfem, a trusted woman more experienced in the ways of the palace, to check on his favorite’s expenditures. Now, during the Iran campaign, it seemed that Roxelana was again facing budgetary problems. The issue was bathing facilities, presumably those of the New Palace harem wing.

  Renovated several years earlier, the hamam presumably served all residents of the expanded harem section. In one of her letters, Roxelana pours forth ecstatic thanks to Suleyman for his positive response to an earlier conversation about the hamam—in it she seems to have hinted that she would be pleased to have a private bath added to her suite of rooms. The letter also expresses gratitude for a directive Suleyman has sent from the field, presumably an order that the matter be sorted out.

  As if to compensate for any presumption on her part, and perhaps also to cajole Suleyman into granting her request, Roxelana writes, “My sultan, may your blessed self never suppose that I, your slave, would request a hamam.” Her excuse is that she is a perfectionist whose allowance doesn’t go far enough. “You know, I am never content when the least little thing is not the way I want it,” she continues. “It’s just that fifty thousand of my silver pieces went on kitchen expenses.” Apparently to assure Suleyman that she is not frivolous, she adds, “I have not put the remainder toward my own use.” Whatever the problem, Suleyman paused in the midst of the most arduous military venture he had yet undertaken to make things right for his new queen.

  The great bulk of Roxelana’s letters, however, continued to be consumed with lament. Expressions of distress at Suleyman’s absence and great longing to be reunited with him abounded. “If you ask after your wretched poor slave,” she wrote, “day and night I burn in the fire of grief over separation from you.” Although embroidered with copious poetic and scriptural ornament, the sentiments were apparently sincere. Mehmed wrote to his father that while at present his mother seemed well on the surface, underneath part of her was not. She was so caught up in missing him, Mehmed added somewhat dramatically, that her moaning and wailing echoed all the way to the world of the dead. “May Allah the Almighty quickly destroy that evil-doer [the shah of Iran] and make it possible for you to come soon,” the prince concluded.

  It is tempting to imagine that during the Iranian campaign Suleyman composed an undated but oft-quoted verse letter for his new wife.36 In the fifth couplet, she is the empire that he knows intimately but also the eastern lands that he may never possess.

  My solitude, my everything, my beloved, my gleaming moon,

  My companion, my intimate, my all, lord of beauties, my sultan

  My life’s essence and span, my sip from the river of Paradise, my Eden

  My springtime, my bright joy, my secret, my idol, my laughing rose

  My happiness, my pleasure, lantern in my gathering, my luminous star, my candle

  My oranges bitter and sweet, my pomegranate, the taper by my bed

  My green plant, my sugar, my treasure in this world, my freedom from woe

  My Potiphar, my Joseph, my existence, my Pharaoh in the Egypt of the heart37

  My Istanbul, my Karaman, my lands of the Byzantines,

  My Bedakhshan, my Kipchak Steppes, my Baghdad, my Khorasan

  Mine, you with the hair like vav , brows like ya , my languid and seditious eye,

  If I die my blood is on your head, so come to my aid, my non-Muslim38

  As if I were a panegyrist at your door, I sing your praises, I wish you well

  My heart filled with grief, my eyes with tears, I am your lover [Muhibbi],

  you bring me joy [Hurrem]

  Poets typically employed pen names, and Suleyman’s was Muhibbi (the lover). In the poem above, the sultan addresses himself explicitly to Roxelana (that is, Hurrem, the name the Ottomans knew her by). In classic poetic fashion, Muhibbi is the besotted and the beseecher, she the elusive and powerful beloved. This inversion of power continues in the next-to-last couplet: she is the non-Muslim who must rescue him, the monarch of a great Muslim empire. By convention, the poet often included his pen name in the final line of a poem; Suleyman, however, also enshrines the memory of his queen by pairing her name with his own.

  Love and desire permeated Ottoman poetry, and Suleyman’s verse was no exception. The love and yearning of the sufi dervish for God, the pining and despair of the spurned or neglected lover, the celebration of the beloved—all filled the lyrics of poets. In the sixteenth century, the poet was everyman—and perhaps everywoman (although the little that scholars have recovered suggests that female poets may have kept some of their sentiments to themselves).39 People ordered up poems the way lovers today buy valentines or roses. The popular poet Zati remarked, “I’ve struck it rich! Every two or three days somebody’s servant comes along and brings me either a few silver coins or a few of gold accompanied by some delicious food or some halvah, and a letter that says ‘write me such and such a kind of poem.’”40 Reciting one’s own or a well-known poem of another was a mark of cultivation. It is not surprising that among the sultans there were esteemed poets. Selim and Suleyman, father and son, were two of them.

  9

  THE TWO FAVORITES

  MEHMED’S WISH FOR his father’s victorious return from the east came true, although not as quickly as he or his mother might have desired. Not until January 8, 1536, did Suleyman make a triumphal entry into Istanbul.1 The two-year campaign against Iran captured Baghdad, ancient center of power, learning, and religious significance, while the acquisition of the two large provinces of Erzurum and Van moved the Ottoman frontier eastward into the Caucasus. It was no wonder that victory celebrations were staged for five days and nights in principal cities of the empire as well as the capital. When it came to Ottoman grandeur, contemporary historians spared no hyperbole: there existed no words to describe these festivities, they asserted, although they managed to detail at great length the widespread “merriment and happiness.”2

  The people of Istanbul were doubtless ready to indulge the great conqueror upon his return, and Suleyman may have found this an opportune moment to celebrate his marriage to Roxelana. The controversial union had to be announced at some point, and the run-up to the Iran campaign in spring 1534, when the contract of marriage was sealed, was an inappropriate time for festivities, especially given the mourning for Suleyman’s mother Hafsa. Now that Suleyman was safely home, Roxelana may have pressed to have her stature as his legal wife made public. I
stanbulites had doubtless felt the sultan’s long absence, and the jubilant aftermath of victory provided an auspicious time to do so.

  Suleyman’s first five military campaigns had established the Ottoman empire as a major player in Europe and the Mediterranean, rivaled only by the Hapsburgs. Now, under the command of the grand vizier Ibrahim, the army had reduced the domains of the Safavid rulers of Iran and stanched their territorial ambitions in Anatolia. Baghdad was a great prize, even though the city in 1535 was not what it once had been. In medieval times, it rivaled metropolises in China as the most populous in the world. Only with its seizure and sack in 1258 by Hulegu, brother of Khubilai Khan, the Mongol emperor of China, did Baghdad lose its stature. Privileging Iran over Iraq, Hulegu’s successors went on to create a brilliant culture that fused Persian and Mongol traditions. Still, even if this once lustrous city had declined to the status of provincial capital, it was key to controlling Mesopotamia. In 1508, Shah Ismail, charismatic young founder of the Safavid dynastic house, had become Baghdad’s sovereign, but Tahmasp, his son, had now given it up to the Ottomans.

  The royal wedding apparently caught some in the foreign community by surprise. “This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans,” remarked the Istanbul representative of the Genoese Bank of Saint George. “The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia.… There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.” If the palace anticipated negative reaction to the event, it offered palliative diversion. “At night the principal streets are gaily illuminated, and there is much music and feasting,” noted the banker’s dispatch. “The houses are festooned with garlands and there are everywhere swings in which people swing by the hour with great enjoyment.”3

  The public festivities highlighted entertainment just as the memorable circumcision celebration of six years before had. Although the 1530 event’s duration and extravagance were greater, the venue was the same, as was, at least in part, the menu of amusements. This time, however, Roxelana was a center of attraction. “In the old Hippodrome a great tribune is set up, the place reserved for the Empress and her ladies screened with a gilt lattice,” wrote the Genoese banker. “Here Roxelana and the Court attended a great tournament in which both Christian and Muslim Knights were engaged, and tumblers and jugglers and a procession of wild beasts.” The giraffes had necks so long that to the unaccustomed spectator they appeared to “touch the sky.”

  The wedding prepared the way for Roxelana’s public career. Soon she would begin the construction of a philanthropic foundation in Istanbul, the first royal mother to build in the Ottoman capital. Here, however, Roxelana challenged yet another precedent. Architectural patronage was the traditional mark of maturity for a royal mother—one who had graduated to provincial service along with her son. Creating an endowed foundation in the city where her son served as prince-governor signaled her assumption of responsibility for the welfare of the empire’s subjects. But Roxelana was still living with Suleyman, and all her sons were still living in the palace. By establishing a new, more prestigious profile for Roxelana, the marriage’s publicity also opened the door to negative reaction.

  IT WAS AROUND this time—the middle years of the 1530s—that unfavorable talk about Roxelana and Suleyman began to circulate on the streets of Istanbul. At issue was the sultan’s unseemly devotion to his favorite, but the murmurs of discontent targeted Roxelana rather than Suleyman. She had, it was rumored, unnaturally seduced the sultan. Ever the pulse of popular opinion, Luigi Bassano commented, “Such love does he bear her that he has so astonished all his subjects that they say she has bewitched him, therefore they call her Ziadi, which means witch.”4 The talk of sorcery apparently did not dissipate over time. Nearly twenty years later, the Hapsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq wrote that Roxelana was “commonly reputed to retain [the sultan’s] affection by love charms and magic arts.”5

  What did people imagine when they called Roxelana Ziadi?6 The vast lands that made up the Ottoman empire encompassed different cultures of witchcraft and sorcery, with local traditions flourishing in the Balkans and the Caucasus, for example.7 One shared vision of the witch was the old woman, poor and ugly, who might entrap her victim. Two couplets by the eighteenth-century Ottoman poet Shaykh Galip depict the menace of her abode and the fear of falling in thrall to her: “An old woman made a dwelling there / A frightful witch, demon-faced” and “Don’t imprison me in the hands of a witch / Kill me, don’t leave me mad like this.”8

  Perhaps not surprisingly, similar tropes of the rustic female witch existed in the Ruthenian lands of Roxelana’s birth, at least in the eyes of the inhabitants’ Polish overlords. In the words of a late sixteenth-century poet, “Poison and enchantment rule Ruthenia / The Ruthenian lands swarm with witches / Here I saw decrepit hags flying in the dark.”9

  Those who, in Bassano’s report, called Roxelana Ziadi may, however, have been thinking of a different kind of female sorcerer—she who fettered men through love, the enchantress of the heart. Nedim, the seventeenth-century poet, spoke for the victim:10 “Finally you have fettered my heart with your tresses. Hey, what sort of witch are you that you bound [me] with strands of your hair?” In the imaginative legacy of the Ottomans, the danger of the seductress was that it was men who suffered in love, not women.11 On the other hand, it was overwhelmingly males who created the canons of love.

  Just when popular antipathy to Roxelana emerged is difficult to say. Already in 1526 the Venetian Senate had learned that the sultan no longer paid attention to Mustafa’s mother but instead “concentrated all his affection” on the mother of his three other sons.12 Venetian diplomats, however, enjoyed privileged information, and this rift may not have been public knowledge. By 1540 or so, however, when Bassano’s sojourn in Istanbul is thought to have ended, Roxelana’s unpopularity in the capital was discernible.

  More consequential than street gossip were the sentiments of the palace and the army. They too, apparently, were distressed by Suleyman’s unorthodox devotion to Roxelana. “For this reason the Janissaries and the entire court hate her and her children likewise,” observed Bassano, “but because the sultan loves her, no one dares to speak.” The Janissaries were potentially the unruliest element in the military, and the military, at least at this point in Suleyman’s reign, was the dominant element in government. Janissary revolts, threatened and real, punctuated the reigns of the strongest of Suleyman’s ancestors. He himself had already experienced the wages of their discontent in 1525, when the soldiers rampaged in Istanbul over the simultaneous absence from the capital of both the sultan and the grand vizier.

  One powerful impetus for the Janissaries’ enmity toward Roxelana was the sultan’s other family. Stationed in Manisa, Mustafa and his mother Mahidevran were out of Istanbul’s sight but hardly out of mind. Even as a child of twelve, Mustafa had won popularity with his father’s soldiers. Throughout his career, Venetian ambassadors continued to describe him in laudatory terms. Bassano wrote that he had “always heard everyone speak ill of the Sultana and her children and well of the first-born and his mother, who is repudiated.”13

  Already, apparently, the story of Mahidevran’s rejection by the sultan had taken hold. It is not clear, though, whether in these years it included the accusation that later ages would make: that Roxelana was responsible for her rival’s “exile” from Istanbul to Manisa. Although untrue in fact—Mustafa and Mahidevran merely followed the ancestral pattern of graduation to the provincial careers they had been trained for—this rumor probably contained the germ of truth that Roxelana was not unhappy to have her rival gone.

  An experienced prince typically participated in his father’s military engagements or else was assigned, as Suleyman had twice been, as “deputy sultan” in Adrianople or Istanbul. Mustafa had neither joined the recent operations in the east nor acted as a placeholder on his father’s throne (Roxelana
’s eldest son Mehmed was by then old enough to act as dynastic figurehead in the capital). Instead, as Mustafa and his troops were a valuable asset, he remained stationed in Manisa during the Iranian war, deputized by his father to act as commander of all Anatolia.14

  According to Bassano, the prince finally experienced the Ottoman-Safavid frontier himself with transfer of his post to the east, temporarily at least. “He stays in Asia, in a city called Charahechmith, thirty days from Constantinople… on the borders with the Sofiani.”15 (Europeans often called the Safavid shah “the Sophy,” or Sufi, because the family originally had risen to prominence, at the dawn of the fourteenth century, as a mystical, or sufi, order.)

  The Italian garbled the name of Mustafa’s new post, Kara Amid (black Amid), the old name for Diyarbakır, the capital of the large eastern province also called Diyarbakır. The city was “black” because of the mammoth walls of black basalt that surrounded it. The province was both a bulwark against Iranian forces and, with its capital on the Tigris River, a gateway to Iraq and Baghdad. This was an important assignment strategically, a post that was likely to see action against renewed Safavid border sorties. But the rumor mill also could construe Mustafa’s transfer eastward as Suleyman’s deliberate distancing of the prince and his mother from the capital.

  As Bassano represented him, Mustafa was a worthy successor to his illustrious ancestors. The Italian informed his readers that “the first-born has with him a most beautiful and magnificent court, no less than that of his father.” Moreover, Mustafa was a man of the utmost justice and had won a name for great generosity. Bassano was not explicitly holding up Mustafa as the next sultan in the making, but his readers would recognize and approve the sovereign attributes of munificence, moral rectitude, and majesty. Mahidevran too came in for praise from Bassano as the model female parent to a prince: “his mother, who is with him, instructs him in how to make himself loved by the people.”16 The encomiums were exaggerated in at least one respect, for even if Mustafa had the audacity to rival his father’s court, he would not have been permitted the resources to do so. The sultan must always and everywhere in his kingdom have no rival.