Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Suleyman was indeed proving a sixteenth-century feminist of sorts. He did not lack for inspiration—and probably encouragement (he had his mother, his favorite and wife, his daughter, and at least one sister). Although—or perhaps because—another sister, Beyhan, had broken with him over the execution of her husband Ferhad Pasha, Suleyman rallied to support Shah Sultan in her marital difficulties. Shah was wed to the Albanian Lutfi Pasha, grand vizier from 1539 until his dismissal and forced retirement in 1541. The rupture was precipitated by an argument between the couple over Lutfi’s harsh punishment of a prostitute, possibly circumcision or the branding of her genitals. In the heat of dispute, the vizier committed an unpardonable act—he struck his princess wife, grounds for their divorce and his banishment. A notable patron of dervishes, Shah continued to observe her sufi piety through further endowments. (Still loyal, Lutfi went on to write a treatise on Ottoman government.)

  Heirs to both Christian Byzantine emperors and Islamic Middle Eastern caliphs and sultans, Ottoman monarchs were necessarily great builders, especially in the century following the fall of Constantinople. Suleyman, however, stands out among his ancestors and descendants for elevating his favorite to partner in his philanthropic planning. Would Suleyman and Roxelana recall that the emperor Justinian I—original patron of Hagia Sophia, now the premier Ottoman mosque—had raised the popular entertainer Theodora to empress? He then made her collaborator in his massive building program to glorify Constantinople. Theodora, who died in 548, by the Christian calendar a millennium before the building of the Haseki hospital, was held to be particularly responsible for charities devoted to the relief of poverty.39

  If they remembered this most famous couple in Byzantine history, Roxelana and Suleyman could not openly emulate them—they were Christian. Moreover, Theodora’s reputation was marred by historians who were unfavorable to both her past and her power; the analogy could be tempting to Roxelana’s detractors. Muslim history, however, provided a perfect couple to invoke: the legendary Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, made famous in part by his appearance in the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, and his wife Zubaida, also legendary as a great philanthropist. To be hailed as “the Zubaida of the times” was the highest accolade a female patron could aspire to. But Roxelana could not yet claim the comparison, for the Haseki, however grand, was only her first charitable undertaking. It would take an elaborate philanthropic establishment in Jerusalem some years later to earn her the honor.

  POLITICS

  11

  FAMILY MATTERS

  FOLLOWING THE IRANIAN campaign of 1534–1535, Roxelana and Suleyman began to spend more time in the winter palace at Adrianople (today’s Edirne). Late November 1540 marked the start of one such sojourn. Roxelana’s transit to Adrianople was apparently an occasion for display—she traveled in “marvelous pomp,” accompanied by a substantial volume of belongings. A few days later, Suleyman himself set out. This brief item of news about the movements of the “grand seigneur” and “la souldane,” his wife, made its way to the French king Francis via the ambassadorial grapevine. The news was contained in a letter dispatched by the Venetian envoy in Istanbul, Alvise Badoer, to Guillaume Pellicier, bishop of Montpellier and Francis’s trusted ambassador in Venice. Pellicier passed it on to his king.1

  Adrianople was a bustling city some three days’ journey northwest of Istanbul. The ancient city became the de facto capital of the Ottomans, displacing Bursa once they controlled enough territory in the Balkans to put a safe distance between the city and the frontier with Europe. When Istanbul became the imperial center after 1453, both former capitals retained a special status. Adrianople was filled with mosques and churches, bazaars, schools, and a palace expanded by Mehmed the Conqueror.2 Framed by three rivers—the Maritza, the Tundzha, and the Arda—it enjoyed a pastoral setting and a milder climate than Istanbul. It was a favorite of sultans like Suleyman who were devoted to the hunt. The gateway to Ottoman Europe, Adrianople was the launching pad for military campaigns that followed major arteries traversing the Balkan domains of the sultans. Between 1535 and 1548, Suleyman would fight his wars exclusively with European powers, making the city an even more attractive second home for the royal couple.

  Custom did not permit Ottoman writers to expose the sultan’s wife to view. But Roxelana was newsworthy, and Europeans did not hold back. The Genoese bank official who recounted her wedding festivities and the ambassadors like Badoer who tracked her public movements tacitly acknowledged that she was becoming a vehicle for showing off the dynasty’s wealth and power. The long baggage train that followed her to Adrianople was a key element in the desired effect, although spectators along the route would have to imagine the queen within her handsome carriage and the luxuries carried on the backs of the mules and camels. Suleyman’s favorite Ibrahim, that walking treasury of riches who dazzled the eyes of the masses as well as the envoys of sovereigns, was gone. Married, dowered, living royally in the New Palace, and now with a mosque to affirm her status, Suleyman’s favorite was increasingly recognizable as a bearer of the empire’s glamour.

  During her travels between the two capitals, Roxelana was conspicuously invisible, so to speak. Glimpses of her carriage and her retinue were likely to be all the more tantalizing now that she was recognized as a political force as well as the object of Suleyman’s extraordinary attentions. Europeans were free to record what they observed, but one combs the writings of Ottomans in vain, at least during Suleyman’s reign, to find mention of her journeys or even of a work as public as the Avrat Pazar foundation. This scant historical record can leave the impression that Roxelana’s life had reached a plateau where her sole preoccupation was her family.

  On the contrary, Roxelana’s marriage in 1534 gradually opened the door to significant, if unpublicized, exercise of power: the move into the New Palace, physical locus of sovereign authority, and then her first philanthropic project. We find Roxelana in this period seizing obvious opportunities as well as unexpected moments that looked open to manipulation, either for her own advantage or that of her husband’s reign. The decade following the marriage was in fact the phase of Roxelana’s career during which she consolidated a political foundation that set the stage for future queen mothers of the dynasty. But Roxelana did not build her role as queen at the cost of her domestic responsibilities. The integrity of the family she shared with Suleyman continued to be her topmost charge, a political office on its own, even if it was at the same time the source of her stability and contentment.

  IT HAD BEEN a long while since the Ottoman public had a queen to watch. Nearly two centuries earlier, a daunting precedent was set by Theodora, daughter of the Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakuzenos. This usurper-emperor sought the military support of Orhan, the second Ottoman ruler, and rewarded him with Theodora’s hand. In 1346, the Byzantine court bid farewell to the princess with great ceremony in Selymbria (Silivri), on the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara, where a delegation of prominent Ottomans received her. A convoy of thirty ships transported the wedding party to the southern shore of the Marmara, whence a large cavalry division escorted the Greek princess overland to Bursa, then the capital.3 It was a late marriage for Orhan, in his fifties at the time. Theodora became the mother of his youngest son, Halil.

  The political benefits of such ritualized journeys were many, among them the pride and perhaps even sense of community experienced by participants and observers alike. Sitti Khatun, princess of the southeastern Anatolian Dulkadir dynasty, was perhaps the last Ottoman bride to arrive in pomp, to be wed in 1450 to Mehmed, the future “Conqueror.” Women were regularly key figures in the recruitment of brides—in this case, the wife of an Ottoman governor inspected the five Dulkadir daughters and singled out Sitti, while the party sent to escort her to Adrianople included a cohort of distinguished women, including Mehmed’s governess.4 Sitti apparently entered Adrianople atop an elephant.

  Five decades earlier, the new capital Adrianople had received the ill-fated Serbi
an princess Oliviera Despina. She was the daughter of Lazar Hrebeljanović, who would be famously martyred in 1389, fighting the Ottomans at Kosovo. A Serbian partisan made an equally legendary battlefield martyr of Murad I, Orhan’s son. In her last journey as royal consort Oliviera followed her husband Bayezid I in 1402 into his disastrous Anatolian captivity at the hands of Timur. The Turko-Mongol conqueror allegedly humiliated Oliviera (and the sultan) by forcing her to perform menial tasks. In his Tamburlaine the Great, first presented in 1590, the English playwright Christopher Marlowe dramatized this unendurable shame, rendering it the cause of Bayezid’s alleged suicide. Released in 1403 after Bayezid’s death, Oliviera spent the rest of her life in the courts of her siblings.

  Roxelana was not the first Christian-born consort to be charged with malign influence on the Ottoman dynasty. Foreign wives furnished a scapegoat to fit the Ottoman penchant for blaming the flaws of a powerful personage on corruption by associates. Historians of the early Ottomans held Oliviera responsible for Bayezid’s love of the royal high life. “Drinking parties and banquets were held, the infidel girl came and wine cups were passed around,” wrote the populist historian Aşıkpaşazade around 1500. Addressing the dynasty’s first ruler (and perhaps reproaching him for enlisting Christians in his battles), he continued, “What do you expect, Osman? Many things happened because of the infidels.”5 Too much carousing, one could infer, had contributed to Bayezid’s defeat by Timur.

  Oliviera’s fate was still talked about in Roxelana’s time. Writing in 1555, the Hapsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq noted that Suleyman had broken the custom of his ancestors by taking a legal wife and explained why sultans after Bayezid I took only concubines as their consorts—Oliviera’s shame was so great that it discouraged future sultans from contracting interdynastic marriages.6 Busbecq’s account wasn’t wholly correct, for the sultans in fact kept making marriages into the 1460s. They did, however, cease producing children with their foreign wives. The practice of reproducing the Ottoman royal line exclusively with slave concubines in fact took root around the start of the fifteenth century. The primary rationale was not that foreign princesses could bring shame on the House of Osman but that children born of mixed royal matches might only be half loyal to the dynasty. Şükrullah, who completed his history of the Ottomans in 1465, claimed that all the sons of Bayezid I, who ruled from 1389 until 1402, had concubine mothers.7 If so, the Serbian Oliviera was one of the first childless wives.

  The Ruthenian Roxelana perhaps had a particular interest in tales of women from the edges of the Slavic-speaking world. Another Serbian queen, one Roxelana likely knew of, was Mara Branković, wife of Murad II and stepmother of Mehmed the Conqueror. The story told about her by statesman George Sphrantzes in his history of the fall of Byzantium offers vivid testimony of another childless wife. When Murad died in 1451 and the Byzantines considered newly widowed Mara for marriage to the emperor Constantine XI Paleologos, they hesitated, thinking she was not a virgin. But Sphrantzes dismissed the objection on the grounds that “she, it is generally believed, did not sleep with [the sultan].” The marriage did not proceed, however. “The sultan’s widow had made a vow to God and decided that if He freed her from the house of her late husband she would not remarry for the rest of her life, but would remain in His service,” wrote Sphrantzes.8 Mara chose wisely, as Constantinople fell two years later. The former queen went on to a distinguished career as a patron of monasteries and intermediary between foreign powers and the court of her stepson Mehmed, toward which she remained well disposed.

  By the mid-fifteenth century, opportunities for queen watching had come to an end. As royal spouses disappeared, concubine mothers rose to prominence. They doubtless drew crowds of onlookers as they traveled in state to and from provincial capitals, but it was their sons, princes of the blood, who bore the thrilling (and to some enthralling) majesty of royalty. The newfound ceremonial prominence of Suleyman’s queen clearly did not sit well with all, but the political as well as entertainment value of her public presence was a resource to exploit.

  IF ROXELANA’S CARRIAGE and its train had become a locally recognized attraction, outside Adrianople and Istanbul the favorite was scarcely more than a name. Roxelana was a much less traveled royal mother than her fellow consort Mahidevran. Mustafa’s mother had made the Manisa-Istanbul circuit at least twice, and soon she would undertake the rare journey to the eastern frontier with her son. Luigi Bassano’s assertion that Diyarbakır, where Mustafa was posted in 1541, was thirty days from Istanbul seems an underestimate. Still, even thirty stops across the highly varied geography of the empire offered an encyclopedic lesson in its many populations, resources, and needs to the maybe future sultan and queen mother.9

  Roxelana’s regal progresses to and from Adrianople were testament to her unique stature, but they must also have sparked conversations about why she was not moving in a different direction—into Anatolia, with her eldest son. In 1540, Mehmed was nineteen years old. His half brother, Mustafa, had been eighteen in 1533 when Suleyman dispatched him to his post in Manisa. Suleyman himself had been only fifteen when his father Selim secured an assignment to Crimean Caffa for his son’s first princely governorate. But Mehmed still lived in the capital with his parents and siblings.

  It was not that Mehmed was unready. He and his younger brother Selim had accompanied their father on the 1537 campaign that ultimately abandoned its goal of seizing Naples (the French failed to attack Milan, their role in the joint maneuver). The decision to withdraw and leave the initiative to Hayreddin Pasha—the famous corsair turned Ottoman admiral—was perhaps as instructive to a prince as victory would have been, as it taught conservation of resources. The following year, Mehmed most likely participated in the sultan’s successful campaign to punish the vassal ruler of Moldavia and strengthen the empire’s hold on this Danubian territory.

  The Anatolian provinces, used to the presence of multiple princes, eagerly awaited the arrival of Suleyman’s sons. The cities of Konya, Kütahya, and Amasya rivaled Manisa as traditional seats of princely governorates. But since the bloodbath of 1513 that eliminated Selim’s rival brothers and their sons, all of them at posts in Anatolia, only Manisa had been graced by a royal presence—Suleyman for eight years (three of which he spent as deputy sovereign in Istanbul or Adrianople) and now Mustafa, for the past seven years. The public was well aware that the sultan had three more eligible sons—Mehmed, Selim, and Bayezid—the two elder of whom were now plausible candidates for governorships.

  There is no overt evidence of popular frustration with Mehmed’s confinement to the capital. Nor was there open criticism of either Suleyman or Roxelana for this apparent breach of dynastic tradition. But there surely was impatient speculation. The organization of a new household for a prince-governor and his mother provided jobs for many. Aspirants for these positions were aware that newly enthroned sultans frequently filled top posts with men and women who had caught their eye during their princely apprenticeship. Females as well as males would be drafted for Mehmed’s household when the time came, although in lesser numbers and with a smaller range of specializations. There must have been many hopefuls among the Janissaries, cavalrymen, New Palace pages in training, scribes, cooks, groomsmen, and falconers (Ibrahim had got his start as Prince Suleyman’s chief falconer). Which of his trusted statesmen would Suleyman choose for the honorable post of lala, the tutor-guardian who would ensure the prince’s compliance with his father’s orders? What promising young women would Roxelana select to fill out the new harem?

  The great question on everyone’s mind, however, was almost certainly Roxelana herself. In 1540, she was around thirty-seven years old, the age at which a woman’s oldest children would typically have established their own families. Would the sultan’s beloved, who had now been with him for twenty years, finally leave his bed to take up the traditional role of the royal mother? Could a queen become the mistress of a small harem establishment in the provinces? Conversely, could R
oxelana bear to let Mehmed go without her? She had learned to be Ottoman together with her firstborn, with all the privileges and privations that entailed.

  THE FAMILY HAD indeed been growing up. When Roxelana wrote to Suleyman during the 1537 campaign, it was apparently with mixed feelings of pride and apprehension that she included “thousands and thousands of prayers and praises” for Mehmed and Selim.10 Selim turned thirteen during the march from Istanbul to the Adriatic coast, somewhat young to experience a complex war plan that anticipated the invasion of Italy. Perhaps he was included on the grounds that Mehmed would be there to encourage and counsel him. This was Mehmed’s first combat experience too, but for Selim his elder brother stood somewhere between sibling and parent. Selim would address Mehmed not by name but respectfully as “older brother,” as Mehmed and his younger siblings would address Mustafa. The brothers, however, shared the honor of joining their father in the most important of his duties as sultan, the defense of his realm. Both were now semipublic figures, but Mehmed enjoyed the status of Roxelana’s senior son.

  Mehmed’s education in the military arts, religion, and history had begun at an early age. In an undated letter to his father, most likely during Suleyman’s German offensive of 1532, the prince demonstrated that his political education was also advancing.11 Reporting on the state of the city, Mehmed noted that all was well despite the outbreak of fire twelve times since Suleyman’s departure; alarms had been sounded and the fires put out rapidly. Much of the letter, however, was taken up with enthusiastic and effusive thanks to Suleyman for reinstating one Pilak Mustafa, a statesman of some standing whom others had apparently criticized. “You have obliged your servant [i.e., himself] by accepting the request I humbly made to you and making your slave Pilak Mustafa governor,” wrote the prince. “I beseech my sultan not to listen to what people say and [then] cast your longtime men to the wayside.” Suleyman had granted Pilak Mustafa high office: the admiralty in 1521, when the naval campaign for Rhodes was on the horizon, and the governorate of Damascus in 1531. But the pasha was dismissed from the latter post in the year of his appointment, perhaps as a consequence of the bad-mouthing. Pilak chose to go into retirement in Cairo.12 His return to favor apparently owed something to the prince.