Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Suleyman was hardly alone among sixteenth-century monarchs in his devotion to his favorites. A biographer of Henry VIII has described as “flamboyant intimacy” the young king’s association with the favorites who served in his Privy Chamber. New ordinances refashioning the chamber into a more private zone were issued in 1526, the same year that Ibrahim and Suleyman undertook a similar reworking of the New Palace.59 In his work on friendship, the late sixteenth-century writer Luis de Zapata noted of Charles V that he had two privados, one his personal favorite, the other “the king’s” favorite (Zapata followed European notions of the king’s two bodies, the person and the office). Charles’ relationship with the former, Don Luis de Avila, was like that of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, wrote Zapata.60 With their interest in past kings, perhaps Suleyman and Ibrahim also compared themselves to the celebrated pair. Hephaestion was Alexander’s childhood friend, trusted commander, and possible lover.

  A prince’s early life experiences were bound to shape the idiom of his reign—in Suleyman’s case, instilling a desire for intimate confidants. He had grown up with the debilitating competition among Selim and his siblings, only to witness a degree of intradynastic violence not seen since the devastating civil war of the early fifteenth century. Suleyman may have found with Ibrahim the fraternal relationship he never had. The slave from Parga safely filled a brotherly role, for he could presumably never rival his master. Suleyman’s closeness to his mother Hafsa and to his tutor Hayreddin, who was still with him at the time of Ibrahim’s execution, may also have been forged in these same bloody years.

  There was a role and a title for the intimate confidant of the sultan: the nedim—the boon companion who provided relief from the cares of government, the courtier who could tell a good story. Ibrahim had certainly been that person to the prince, what with his music making and his love for history. But as sultan, Suleyman crossed the line when he made the talented slave his grand vizier in order to keep him close, or so it seemed to the public. Did Suleyman cross another line by persisting in openly demonstrating his devotion to the empire’s highest statesman, to the point that a diplomat could inform a European audience that the sultan loved Ibrahim more than he was loved by his vizier, who only loved himself? Was Suleyman’s great rival Charles, with his two favorites, wiser?

  Ottoman society tolerated, and in some circles welcomed, intimate friendship among males. The sixteenth century has recently been dubbed an “age of beloveds,” in which young men were objects of desire among powerful men, poets, and artists and “the inspiration for a rich literature of love.”61 Poetry was the principal medium for expressing love (of females as well as males), and several members of the royal family participated in this celebration of desire.

  There were certain rules, however. The strong should not love the strong, thereby disrupting the convention of power disparity between lover and beloved and putting both at risk of a shameful loss of decorum. But if Suleyman’s subjects perceived a problem in his intimacy with his powerful vizier, neither Ottomans nor Venetians cared to note it in writing. Bragadin, however, did transmit the angry words of Ferhad Pasha, husband of Suleyman’s sister Beyhan. Stung by accusations of misgovernment, Ferhad retorted, “That whore Ibrahim is the cause of this.”62 It was the worst of insults: whatever Ferhad had uttered in Turkish Bragadin translated as bardassa (a promiscuous girl); the ambassador chose the feminine form of the word. The pasha’s outburst occurred early in Ibrahim’s ascendancy (he was executed in 1524 for his persistent misdeeds).

  If Roxelana resented Suleyman’s intimacy with his male favorite or shared Ferhad’s opinion of him, the record is silent. Certainly she did not lack for evidence of Suleyman’s continuing passion for her. He discarded one precedent after another to keep her at his side, culminating in her emergence as the first and only Ottoman queen. If 1536 was the year of Ibrahim’s exit from the stage of history, it marked Roxelana’s debut as a player. She was celebrated in Suleyman’s poems and known as his beloved among Europeans, and also doubtless in Iran.

  If the literary culture of the era honored male friendship, it also treasured the great romances of the Persian world, especially the tales of ancient kings and the women they loved and desired. Well known among the Ottomans was the story of Khosraw, who fell in love with the Armenian princess Shirine, made her his queen, and killed her would-be lover Farhad. The romantic epic The Seven Beauties—named for the wives of the heroic king Bahram Gur, among them princesses of the Slavs, the Turks, and the Roman emperor—was a cautionary tale as well as a romance. So consumed was Bahram Gur in the seven pleasure pavilions he built for the beauties that his minister usurped power; after listening to seven victims of the empire’s subsequent disarray, the king slew the minister and turned the pavilions into temples.

  It was not that life imitated fiction but that the trials and temptations of sovereigns were timeless. Religion, law, and royal tradition guided kings and queens, but so did literature, which could teach ethics and history as it entertained.63 In the poetic imagination inherited by the Ottomans, beloved queens were foreign, ministers could be tempted to fill the void opened by distracted kings, queens could be mere objects of desire or commanding figures like Shirine, and ultimately kings must rule.

  10

  BUILDING A REPUTATION

  IN 1538, CONSTRUCTION began on a new mosque in an Istanbul neighborhood somewhat distant from the city’s imperial core. It was the nucleus of a foundation that would soon expand to include two schools—a madrasa to provide advanced education to older youths and a primary school that taught letters and scripture to children of the neighborhood. The next structure to rise up was a large soup kitchen. Some years later, the complex gained a hospital, a rare amenity. A fountain on the soup kitchen’s grounds brought fresh water to neighborhood residents, a further boon.

  Roxelana’s Istanbul foundation was the first of the philanthropic efforts that would punctuate the rest of her career. By the time of her death, major charitable institutions existed in her name in the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem and in the Ottoman capitals of Istanbul and Adrianople, while smaller endowments were scattered across the empire in regional capitals and towns.1 Works she built or supported financially included hostels for wayfarers, pilgrims, and religious devotees, as well as additional mosques and soup kitchens. Roxelana also attended to the second face of Ottoman piety, the mystical, by building sufi lodges and mosques for revered spiritual leaders.2 But her first project was the most significant, for it was Roxelana’s debut as a public servant.

  Charitable giving was an obligation for all Muslims who had even a small amount of disposable income, and the Ottoman dynastic house was expected to lead. The great Istanbul foundations of Mehmed the Conqueror, his son Bayezid, and their leading statesmen had forged the recovery of Constantinople after its decline in the late decades of Byzantium. Roxelana recognized that undertaking a substantial philanthropic project was the single most effective means of legitimating her extraordinary elevation to queenhood. If anything would win the hearts and minds of Ottoman subjects in a lasting way, it was a graceful edifice that offered tangible benefits to ordinary people.

  For Muslims, such donations to the public welfare were hayrat, good deeds or good works that won merit in God’s eyes. Obituary notices of prominent figures regularly included their record of philanthropic projects. In other words, the users and admirers of Roxelana’s mosque complex would recognize—and respect—an intentional act of piety. At the same time, both subjects and foreign observers of the sultanate understood that her foundation was a display of power. In a culture that disapproved of physical representation of the sovereign on statues and in portraits, even on coins, monumental architecture was the most obvious demonstration of wealth and influence. Like the foundations endowed by the sultans and many of their viziers, Roxelana’s eventually gave its name to the area in which it was located—today the busy Istanbul district is officially known as Haseki (the royal favorit
e).3

  For prominent women, who did not reveal their persons openly in public, building was an even more consequential gesture. Although her wedding had been celebrated, Roxelana enjoyed no public coronation like that in May 1533 of her contemporary Anne Boleyn, the favorite of Henry VIII. The lavish celebrations in London lasted four days (the ambassador from Milan estimated the total cost at 200,000 ducats). The first day featured a procession along the Thames of barges and smaller vessels numbering more than three hundred; on the last day the coronation itself took place.4 Roxelana was queen by virtue of Suleyman’s desire, as no traditional or legal category legitimated such a position. It was her act of charity toward Istanbul that was both proclamation and justification of her queenhood. It endured long after both Anne and she were dead.

  The location and timing of her architectural debut announced Roxelana’s maverick status. Her foundation was the first in Istanbul donated by and called after a woman. Tradition dictated that it was only after a royal mother graduated from the imperial center together with her son that she acquired the privilege of public patronage. Her projects tended to be located in or near the province where her son served as governor. And, like Hafsa, who began her Manisa project late in Suleyman’s princely tenure, she typically initiated foundations only once her son was well established in his public career.

  Philanthropic giving, in other words, was a privilege of mature political motherhood, a status Roxelana had yet to achieve by traditional measures. When the planning for the Haseki foundation began, Mehmed, age sixteen, had not yet departed from Istanbul for a provincial governorship; nor was it clear when he would. Roxelana’s project was only the latest challenge to established dynastic practices already pushed aside to make way for the concubine’s unprecedented ascent to freedom and marriage to the sultan. Moreover, the Haseki was the first foundation constructed in the builder’s own name by a member of the current royal generation. At the outset of his reign, Suleyman had built a mosque complex in memory of his father Selim, but nothing since.

  Hindsight allows us to see that the Haseki helped to redirect the momentum that drove Suleyman’s reign. The execution of Ibrahim in March 1536 signaled a shift in priorities. Instead of lavishing resources on the splendor of the sultan’s person, palace, and retinue, political work the grand vizier excelled at, spending would now be conspicuously focused on channeling resources into the public welfare. Roxelana’s philanthropic donations were instrumental in Suleyman’s efforts to consolidate a stronger sunni Muslim identity after the recent victory over the shi`i Safavids.

  ROXELANA DOUBTLESS RECEIVED advice in the choice of a site for her foundation, but the final decision bore her imprint. The neighborhood selected for the mosque was associated with females—it held a weekly market commonly known as Avrat Pazar (women’s market). John Sanderson, secretary to the English embassy at the end of the sixteenth century, described it as “the markett place of women, for thether they come to sell thier wourkes and wares.”5 It must have been unusual for the times, for the neighborhood had come to be popularly, if not officially, known as Avrat Pazar.

  Writing a century later, the famous traveler Evliya Çelebi noted that people commonly called Roxelana’s mosque “Haseki Avrat.” Apparently the benefactor, her female beneficiaries, and the neighborhood had become intimately linked in the popular mind.6 Women of the neighborhood could gain much from the queen’s foundation. Males might be the sole beneficiaries of its madrasa, but women could pray discreetly in the mosque and line up for the fountain’s water and the soup kitchen’s dole. Little girls sometimes attended primary schools, and Roxelana perhaps encouraged coeducation in hers. She herself had had excellent teachers and a cohort of fellow students as she struggled to learn, and she might hope to offer something of the same opportunity to the less fortunate girls in her adopted neighborhood. They lacked the privilege enjoyed by daughters of better-off families, who might learn alongside the brothers for whom private tutors were hired.

  The market at Avrat Pazar, featuring Roxelana’s mosque, the column of Arcadius, and men and women buying and selling wares.

  Though not what it had been in its Byzantine heyday, the Avrat Pazar neighborhood boasted a distinguished history. Roxelana’s mosque stood on the long downward slope of Istanbul’s seventh hill. It stretched from the fifth-century Byzantine city wall, still the city’s defensive bulwark, to the Sea of Marmara. “New Rome,” as Constantine I’s capital was often called, mirrored the topography of Old Rome and its seven hills. Ottoman royalty chose the pinnacles or upper slopes of the hills for several of their most imposing foundations, both to provide greater visibility on the Istanbul horizon and to offer a panoramic outlook from the precincts of the complex. Later in her life, Roxelana and Suleyman’s only daughter Mihrumah would endow a mosque at the peak of the sixth hill.

  The Byzantine past echoed vividly in the Haseki complex, for its locale overlapped the old forum of the emperor Arcadius.7 It was the last of the four great Byzantine city squares that punctuated the Mese (middle way), the principal thoroughfare of Constantinople under both the emperors and then the sultans. Constructed in 403, Arcadius’s forum lay on the western branch of the Mese, which forked at the old Forum of the Bull. Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II had situated his large mosque complex at this juncture. Both forums featured tall columns that signaled their location, each column adorned with a spiral sculptural band depicting the victorious exploits of the forum’s founder. Arcadius’s son, Theodosius II (builder of the city’s outer wall) had placed an equestrian statue of his father atop the enormous column. The statue tumbled in an earthquake in 704, but the column still stood when Roxelana built her complex. In sixteenth-century panoramas drawn by European and Ottoman artists, Arcadius’s truncated column marks the location of the Haseki.

  When Roxelana adopted the site of the Byzantine forum for her project, she would know some, if not all, of its history. She probably knew something of the Forum of the Bull, as it was the closest of the four to the Old Palace. Originally designed by Constantine I, this forum was remodeled and embellished by Arcadius’s father Theodosius I. Devotee of Byzantine imperial monuments, Mehmed the Conqueror commissioned an Italian artist to make drawings of this column’s sculptural program.8 Less reverent than his father toward the antiquities of the empire, Bayezid had the column dismantled and some of its stones placed in the walls of the new public bath he built for his foundation. Bayezid may have had good reason for remaking the old forum, for in late Byzantine times the area had become a refuge for robbers who hid among the wild trees that overran the once open space.9

  That Roxelana had a strong hand in the early planning of the Haseki is suggested by her close oversight after the complex was completed—she appointed herself for the duration of her lifetime to the executive office of endowment supervisor. The careful detail with which the queen specified the qualifications and daily wages of the staff employed in the complex provides yet further proof of her intimate involvement in the implementation of her foundation.

  The complex’s Avrat Pazar location raises the question of whether Roxelana had as one of her goals the specific welfare of females. That one of the key administrative positions she specified for her foundation was a female scribe suggests that she did, but we can only surmise her motives.10 This was an unusual stipulation, since female functionaries of the times were virtually unknown in public institutions. Perhaps the lady secretary’s job was to facilitate women’s access to the complex’s services or to receive their petitions or complaints. It is not hard to imagine a neighborhood woman voicing concern about long lines at the fountain, or asking about her child’s eligibility for the primary school, or perhaps seeking the dole from the soup kitchen.

  But how was the female staff member of the foundation trained for the job? The one place in the capital that we know had a staff of skilled female scribes was the harem quarters of the imperial palaces. That a trained scribe put to paper Roxelana’s own letters is evident
from their refined penmanship. Even after the queen mastered enough Turkish to write her own communications, she continued to call on the services of a scribe and doubtless kept at least one on her personal staff. Entrusted with intimate or politically revelatory knowledge, a personal secretary was recognized as a confidential intimate, in Turkish a “scribe of secrets.” Some palace staff would also be skilled in bookkeeping and budget balancing as they kept the accounts of high-ranking women’s income and expenditures.

  Roxelana may have chosen the lady scribe herself or made recommendations to the trustee of her foundation, manager of its operations. Perhaps the woman was a loyal member of her household, just as the trustee was of Suleyman’s. Where the lady scribe actually worked is not obvious, whether in the sixteenth-century equivalent of an office at the foundation or out of the palace. If the former, Roxelana could meet directly with her on visits to the complex or summon her to the palace for a check on how things were going.

  Whether Roxelana was a forward-looking equal opportunity employer or merely wanted a direct hand in the foundation’s business is hard to say—perhaps it was both. But if anyone were to challenge the etiquette of women’s employment, it would be Roxelana, who was busy fashioning an innovative career for herself. Her successors—both her own descendants and the queen mothers who built on the model of her career—would continue to show concern for other women, especially those unable to control their fates. Roxelana’s great-granddaughter Aisha provided funds to ransom Muslim prisoners of war, with the proviso that female captives be liberated first.11 At the end of the century, the queen mother Safiye intervened to suspend the sentence of drowning in the Bosphorus imposed on prostitutes by the chief eunuch. As John Sanderson, the English secretary, told the story, Safiye had sighted the execution in process as she strolled in the palace with members of her son’s harem. “Shee, taking displeasure, sent word and advised the eunuch Bassa that her sonne [absent on campaign] had left him to govern the citie and not to devoure the women.”12