Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Suleyman in his private library conversing with Mehmed. The sultan sits at his writing table, with books stacked behind him. Palace officials and dwarves accompany father and son. Talikizade, Şemâilnâme-i l-i Osmân.

  Mehmed’s education also included the arts of language. In addition to the requisite Arabic, Persian, and literary Ottoman Turkish, his reading competency may have extended to Italian, probably with the assistance of a tutor. “My sultan, I am reading the second volume of Menavin,” the prince noted in the same letter.13 In 1504, corsairs had captured Giovanni Antonio Menavino, son of a Genoese merchant, while on a voyage with his father. The boy found himself in Istanbul, enslaved, serving as a page to Suleyman’s grandfather and then father. Bayezid II, who spoke some Italian, had scrutinized the twelve-year-old personally on his entry into the New Palace. By his own account, Menavino learned to read and write Turkish alongside the sultan’s grandchildren.14 Escaping in 1514, he went on to write The Five Books of the Laws, Religion, and Life of the Turks, published in 1548 in Venice but perhaps completed earlier. How a copy of the manuscript made its way to the palace library is not clear. Perhaps the grand vizier Ibrahim requested it, although Menavino himself possibly sent a presentation copy to Suleyman. The two may have crossed paths when the prince served as deputy ruler in Istanbul in 1512 and 1513.

  A pattern was emerging in the careers of Roxelana and Suleyman’s sons, with Mehmed and Selim a senior pair to the junior pair of Bayezid and Cihangir. The two eldest brothers had shared the great circumcision festival of 1530 with each other and Mustafa. Now Bayezid and Cihangir’s turn had come. The circumcision of the two youngest was celebrated in November 1539, when Bayezid was around twelve and Cihangir eight. It was a time of general good feeling and delight, noted Solakzade Mehmed in his history, due to the latest victories in the Mediterranean and Europe. Suleyman had taken a hunting holiday near Bursa earlier that fall. Roxelana, however, was presumably occupied with readying her children for their public debut.

  The program of receptions and popular entertainments for this gala event was similar to that of 1530 and the venue—the Hippodrome—the same. The festivities, directed by the grand vizier Lutfi Pasha, were a week shorter, however (Ibrahim Peçevi thought Lutfi negligent; Solakzade deemed him efficient).15 The imperial budget may have been temporarily tight; much money had gone into the navy in recent years, and in 1538 the Ottomans had seen simultaneous combat on three fronts (the Mediterranean, central Europe, and the Indian Ocean). Perhaps it was also a deliberate scaling back of the lavish expenditure that had been so characteristic of the Ibrahim years.

  On the other hand, the empire was more powerful now, a reality seemingly underlined by the royal menagerie on display, with its lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, lynx, wolves, and awe-inducing giraffes. More nations sent their ambassadors this time—Venice of course, but also France, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and Hungary (or what remained of the kingdom after Ferdinand and Suleyman had staked claims to large parts of it). Once again, the Persian Safavids were not invited.

  MORE SIGNIFICANT IN this family extravaganza than the circumcision was the marriage of Mihrumah, Roxelana and Suleyman’s second child and only daughter. Despite the fact that a princess’s marriage was the equivalent of a prince’s departure for his provincial governorship—marking entry into the adult world—the event went unmentioned in the eyewitness histories of the times composed by Celalzade Mustafa, Suleyman’s private secretary, and Lutfi Pasha himself.16 This silence reflected in part the usual Ottoman reticence in speaking of royal women but also the fact that the signing of the marriage contract and the wedding celebrations were both private affairs, held within the walls of the palace. Town criers would circulate, however, calling out invitations to the celebrations. The crowds enjoying the clowns and fire artists were surely aware that it was a princess’s marriage in part that drew them to the Hippodrome.

  Portrait of Mihrumah, second half of the sixteenth century. The Latin caption reads, “Cameria daughter of the emperor Suleyman, wife of Rustem Pasha.”

  Mihrumah was seventeen, an appropriate age for a young woman to wed. The groom was Rustem, a man of Croatian origin and a product of the elite training system. Rustem was a successful statesman who had worked his way up through the ranks. From service to Suleyman in the Privy Chamber, he had progressed to the prestigious office of master of the horse in the New Palace outer service. Then, in 1533, he graduated to public office. After serving as governor of Diyarbakır, he earned a promotion in 1538 to the governorship of Anatolia (second only to European Rumelia in the hierarchy of Ottoman provincial offices). In preparation for the marriage, Suleyman appointed Rustem third vizier.

  Becoming a vizier of the Divan required that Rustem reside in Istanbul, at least in peacetime. Mihrumah was thus relieved of starting married life in a provincial capital, as several of Suleyman’s sisters had done. Here we might suspect the hand of Roxelana, for Mihrumah would be the first of the children to leave her care. But Suleyman too, affectionate by nature, may have been loath to allow his only daughter to depart from the family circle as his sons inevitably would. Mihrumah may also have put her own foot down and insisted on a marriage that would keep her in the capital. Very much her mother’s daughter, she would prove spirited and strong willed.

  It was her parents’ duty to ensure the best match possible for Mihrumah. The ideal union for a princess was not simply a compatible one that would keep her happy, however. It would also be a political alliance, and the royal parents would choose Rustem primarily because they judged him to possess the talents for superior long-term service to the dynastic family. Princesses around the world—and their husbands too—had always been destined for marriages that operated as strategic tools for creating or strengthening political bonds. The Ottoman sultans ceased betrothing their daughters and sons to foreign royalty in part because the empire had subjugated the very powers it once needed as allies. But it was also partly because the slave service nobility had demonstrated itself to be the most effective and, more important, the most loyal force for consolidating the dynasty’s control of its conquered lands.

  The union of Mihrumah and Rustem was in all probability not a love match. Rustem was twice Mihrumah’s age. Apparently he was not Roxelana’s first choice for her daughter. The queen had her eye instead on the handsome governor of Cairo, or so reported the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero (according to whom Rustem was not handsome—he was small and red faced). Rustem, however, allegedly foiled her plan by inducing the royal doctor Moshe Hamon to say that the governor was afflicted with syphilis.17

  Mihrumah herself may have been reluctant to accept the older statesman. She had theoretical grounds on which to resist, for Islamic law gave a virgin the right to refuse the husband selected by her guardian (typically the father). While the sultans tended to ignore the law when political exigency trumped legal propriety, in this case religious duty and affection most likely conspired to gain her parents’ respect for Mihrumah’s sentiments. But in the end, it seems, the princess consented, possibly after a good deal of persuasion or pressure. Like all children of the dynastic family, Mihrumah was called upon to sacrifice personal desire to public duty.

  The safety valve for an Ottoman princess who could not marry for love was the privilege of divorcing her husband should the union turn out badly. Two years after Mihrumah’s wedding, Suleyman’s sister Shah Sultan divorced her grand vizier husband Lutfi for his physical violence toward her. Fatma, another of Selim I’s daughters, was already divorced from her first husband, governor of the Mediterranean province of Antalya, who showed more interest in males than in his new wife.18 The young but eloquent Fatma complained by letter to her father, pleading to return home: “I have fallen into the hands of someone who treats me worse than a dog. Since coming here, I have not had a single hour of happiness, I have donned none of my robes. I have risen from the dead like a widow.… My sultan, dear father, let me wear cloth of coarse wool instead of the cloth o
f rudeness, let me eat barley bread, just let me live in your shadow.”19 Fatma’s bad luck would continue when her second husband was executed, but she is said to have found happiness with a third, the eunuch Ibrahim Pasha. Kindness and consideration apparently triumphed.

  Mihrumah probably knew something of her aunt Fatma’s first marriage, but she could not help knowing that her aunt Beyhan was deeply angry over the execution of her husband Ferhad. But alongside these cautionary tales, Mihrumah perhaps entertained romantic notions of love. Hers was an unusual upbringing for the daughter of a sultan. She was accustomed to a father who composed copious love poetry and a mother who suffered during his absences. Her parents were a monogamous couple whose relationship was clearly cemented by mutual devotion. And because Suleyman broke with the dynasty’s reproductive protocols, Mihrumah had four full brothers, to three of whom she was older sister. Indeed, if her father had conformed to protocol, Mihrumah would never have been born at all, for Roxelana would have departed from his bed once she gave birth to Mehmed.

  BY THE ISLAMIC calendar, Suleyman turned forty in August 1533, the age of full male maturity. Fittingly, this was also the year he dispatched Mustafa, his eldest son, to take up the post of governor. With a prince in the field and a wealth of pashas capable of leading the Ottoman army (as Ibrahim had for most of the Safavid war), Suleyman could well have delegated command to his grand viziers. He had already proven himself a great warrior in the mode of his ancestors, and war was not the only domain of rule that called for the sovereign’s attention. But there was also the unceasing summons to compete with the extraordinary cast of powerful European monarchs who had been born within twelve years of each other: Henry VIII in 1491, Francis I and Suleyman himself in 1494, Charles V in 1500, and his brother Ferdinand in 1503.

  Roxelana had presumably learned to manage during Suleyman’s absences. After the death in 1534 of his mother Hafsa, a seasoned politician, she became his most trusted family correspondent. When Mehmed, now also an epistolary confidant of his father, joined him on campaign, Roxelana was his sole correspondent. The political acumen her letters began to exhibit tallied with the increasing authority she had accrued over the years. Among Roxelana’s few surviving letters to Suleyman, one she composed in the summer of 1537 suggests that she no longer needed a harem scribe to translate her thoughts into tolerable Turkish, although she continued to employ one for drafting the final copy. Suleyman was doubtless pleased to receive his wife’s own words of affection but less so her candid assessment of conditions in the capital.

  The epidemic-ridden city was suffering once again. “There is still sickness, although it is not as bad as before,” Roxelana reported. “Our saintly ones say that it will pass when the autumn leaves fall.” She reassured Suleyman that all would be well by his return. Meanwhile, however, there was a different problem—Istanbul was not receiving enough bulletins from the front, although earlier news of a victory had, as Roxelana put it, “brought the whole world from darkness into the light of God’s mercy.”20

  The city’s inhabitants were inclined in wartime to believe that no news was bad news, and in 1537 they turned out to be partly right. Roxelana could warn the sultan of the dangerous consequences of poor communications more outspokenly than his pasha lieutenant in the capital was likely to. “I ask you, I beg you, to send news quickly, very quickly, because—and I swear I am not lying—no courier has come for the last week or two,” she pleaded. “The whole world is clamoring, all kinds of rumors are circulating.” This was not just a pretext for eliciting a letter from her absent beloved. “Don’t think it is just for myself that I am asking.”

  Although this was a shorter, more succinct letter than Roxelana’s earlier missives, she still devoted the first half to multiple expressions of yearning for Suleyman’s return and prayer to God to hasten the moment she could bow to the ground before him. She is drowning in the sea of longing; she can no longer tell night from day; she is the nightingale whose song goes unheard. Her condition is direr than that of Majnun and Farhad (great heroes of legend who went mad from loving women who eluded them). Then, after an abrupt “Amin” (amen), Roxelana gets down to business. Suleyman has “lifted her up from the ground” by dispatching a gift of 5,000 gold florins. “Now my sultan, what great trouble you went to,” she writes. “A single hair of your beard is worth more to me than one hundred thousand florins.” If Roxelana’s playful voice and fondness for colorful images had shown here and there before, now they dominated her personal missives.

  Roxelana also had homelier reasons for wanting Suleyman to write more frequent letters—namely, the practicalities of supervising the family she shared with him. For one thing, sojourns in Adrianople were becoming routine and required significant advanced planning. Between fall 1537 and spring 1541, the winter palace was Suleyman’s capital for all or part of three winters, and possibly all four. These were no mere seasonal holidays, for much of the court moved with the sultan, as did foreign ambassadors resident in Istanbul—the French ambassador Antonio Rincon, for instance, reported by dispatch from Adrianople in the winter of 1538–1539.21 Roxelana would want to know if her husband planned for the whole family to join him there or wanted any of them, even her, to remain in Istanbul. The Adrianople palace needed to be informed about domestic arrangements, as did the two palaces in Istanbul. And Roxelana would want to keep up with news of the Haseki foundation’s progress. The famous Ottoman chiaus, royal messengers and heralds, could handle rapid communications, but if the queen was to leave Istanbul for the winter, she had responsibilities that would require arrangements in her absence.

  One of these was the Old Palace. Although her principal residence was now the New Palace, whose harem division she was actively developing, the Old Palace still maintained quarters for the queen. How frequently she spent time there, or for how long, is unknown, although Suleyman’s absences at war and on hunting expeditions were likely opportunities for prolonged stays in her old home. It is unclear if any of her five children were still living there or if all had moved with their mother to the New Palace in or after 1534.

  If the younger boys, Cihangir and Bayezid, remained in their original home to take advantage of the care and education that was its stock in trade, their mother’s visits were probably quite frequent. Cihangir’s back possibly required continued medical attention, either for treatment of discomfort or additional procedures like the one Roxelana had described by letter to Suleyman during the eastern war. If so, the Old Palace, with a hospital geared toward treating women and children, was the more appropriate home. But the child, still young, perhaps insisted on being with his mother rather than remaining with his governess.

  With the death of the queen mother Hafsa, supervision of Old Palace affairs had passed into Roxelana’s hands. While the day-to-day management of both residences was the business of experienced female administrators and eunuch officials, Roxelana was the authority for major decisions and serious problems. Irresolvable tensions, budgetary difficulties, important promotions or dismissals—such matters required executive input. Her principal collaborator in the Old Palace was the Lady Steward, the institution’s majordomo. In the 1555 register of palace stipends, hers is a lofty 150 silver aspers, three times that of Ali Agha, the highest-paid palace eunuch official (45 aspers).22

  One aspect of Old Palace management that surely engaged Roxelana was the training of the young slave recruits. The queen could hardly help but have an interest in them. Her own enslavement was the transforming event of her life, and she had progressed through the same processes of molding that they were now undergoing. Moreover, Roxelana’s close access to Old Palace personnel put her in an excellent position to select talented females and eunuchs for transfer to her own service in the New Palace. And when the time came, both harems would be resources for the princely households of her sons.

  As Bassano noted, Roxelana made a practice of marrying her “damsels” to graduates of the male palace training regime, and she may well have
made alliances for other women in the Old Palace school. One wonders if Mehmed’s championing of Pilak Mustafa Pasha had to do with such a harem connection. According to Peçevi, the pasha’s marital alliance had boosted his career: “After he rose to the rank of governor general, he was married to a lady named Shahhuban, one of the slave women of the imperial harem, and because of this he was graced with the vizierate.”23 Peçevi was wrong about the vizierate (Pilak never rose that far), but the marriage did precede Pilak’s promotion to Damascus governor, a prestigious post that controlled all of the Levant except the Aleppo region. Here, Hafsa rather than Roxelana may have taken the lead in matching Shahhuban to Pilak Mustafa, but Roxelana succeeded the queen mother as the ultimate matchmaker.

  When Suleyman and Roxelana arranged compatible matches for imperial slaves, they could be said to act in loco parentis. Their motivations were not wholly unlike the ideals (if not always the realities) of typical Ottoman slave-owning families: to create capable servants, eventually free them, but remain associated with them after manumission. Ottoman practice, underpinned by Islamic law, set ground rules for a servitude that was ideally only temporary, since many Muslims considered freeing a slave a good deed in the eyes of God. Pilak Mustafa had been manumitted when he graduated from New Palace training to public office (his first post had been a junior governorship in Ioannina on the Adriatic coast); Shahhuban was manumitted when she left the palace to marry him.