Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  During the mid-1540s, both Suleyman and Roxelana found solace in planning a memorial mosque for Mehmed. In 1544 builders broke ground next to the exquisitely adorned tomb constructed to house Mehmed’s grave.8 Completion of the mosque and its attendant structures—madrasa, soup kitchen, caravanserai cum hostel, and primary school—would take five years.

  The Mosque of the Prince, as it became known, is remembered today as Suleyman’s tribute to his son. Contemporary observers, however, also credited Roxelana as an active force behind the project. According to the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero, “The Grand Signor and [the prince’s] mother wanted to honor him with a most beautiful and most sumptuous mosque.” Domenico Trevisano echoed his predecessor, commenting also that all who knew him loved the prince for his graciousness, comeliness, and habits, “being by nature humane and generous.”9 Even the late sixteenth-century historian Mustafa `Ali, bitterly critical of Roxelana’s political influence, wrote that the mosque’s unusual plan, fit more for a sultan than a prince, stemmed from the exceptional love that Mehmed’s “fortune-favored mother and illustrious father felt for him in their hearts.”10 While these comments credit Roxelana’s involvement to parental devotion, the queen could also bring a practical voice to the planning from her experience with her own foundation.

  In authorizing Mehmed’s complex, unprecedented for a prince in its magnificence and the long period of its construction, Suleyman was taking the risk that he might never build a monument of his own in the Ottoman capital. It was certainly time for the sultan to contemplate construction of his own foundation. His great-grandfather Mehmed II had begun his mosque in the twenty-second year of his reign, and his grandfather Bayezid II in the twentieth year. His father Selim I had not lived to undertake this endeavor, the crowning material donation of an Ottoman sovereign to his subjects. In 1544, Suleyman entered the twenty-fifth year of his sultanate; he could hardly have predicted the extraordinary longevity of both himself personally and his reign. Fortunately, or perhaps by design, Suleyman had the women in his family to rely on in the meanwhile.

  Mehmed’s burial in Istanbul was exceptional, noted Trevisano, for it was “usual for all the sons of the emperors to be buried in Bursa.”11 The royal Bursa tombs were elegant, but a modesty of scale was maintained in the pastoral precincts of Murad II’s mosque, where graves clustered from the mid-fifteenth century onward. Not only was Mehmed’s eternal presence in the capital a highly visible break with tradition, but the choice of the Janissary barracks as the site of the foundation was also laden with meaning.

  It was Mustafa, Suleyman’s oldest son, who was famously admired and hailed by the Janissaries. Everything about Mehmed’s memorial seemed carefully designed to demonstrate that the sultan’s firstborn with Roxelana was likewise a defender of the empire’s welfare, having given his life in dutiful service. We can only speculate whether Mustafa felt threatened by the uncanonical aggrandizement of Mehmed’s memory, or whether he too mourned the passing of the prince to whom he had been elder brother for the twelve years they lived together in the Old Palace.

  The importance of the Janissaries, seemingly the only force in the empire that could effectively challenge the sovereign, was not lost on Roxelana. During the construction of Mehmed’s mosque, she cultivated an association with them, or so it seems from a flattering story recorded in Customs of the Janissaries of the Imperial Household. This anonymous text of 1606, addressed to Roxelana and Suleyman’s great-great-grandson Ahmed I, complained of eroding military standards and looked back to the “good old days.” According to the account, “Her Highness the Haseki Sultan” paid a visit to the construction site, during which she noticed young Janissary novices, bareheaded and barefoot, hauling sacks filled with earth and stones. Presumably overcome with concern, she urged Suleyman to provide them with a five-asper monthly raise to furnish them with shoes. When he did, she allegedly sold her gold, pearls, and jewels and transferred the funds to the treasury to cover the raise, which Suleyman later wrote into law.12

  The story ends by wishing the Haseki heavenly reward for her good deed. However embroidered it might be, the tale is emphatic with regard to Roxelana’s compassion and generosity. One of its morals is that sultans sometimes need to be encouraged to do the right thing, and it is good to have hasekis who can tutor them. The tale also suggests Roxelana’s recognition that quotidian good works might be as effective in cultivating a reputation for benevolence as endowing large complexes, especially among the Janissaries. On the other hand, the gesture may simply have been spontaneous. This was not the only time Roxelana would make provision for slaves. The memory of her own early days as a captive of the Ottomans perhaps stimulated her concern for the novices, all of them young slaves of the dynasty drafted into heavy manual labor.

  Stories such as this one did not make their way into the reports of European ambassadors. For them, news of the queen’s political sway was both more available and more saleable than testimony about her human touch. Laborers and master craftsmen working at the construction site, however, might notice and comment favorably. And who knew which novice might rise to high rank in the Janissary corps, perhaps even becoming its commanding agha, and recall Roxelana’s thoughtfulness?

  WHEN BAYEZID TOOK up his provincial post in Konya in 1546, his mother was in her early forties. She had been Suleyman’s partner for twenty-five years, virtually the whole of his reign. Little more than a decade had passed since she had become his wife and taken up residence in the quarters carved out for her in the New Palace. Only a gate and a stroll through Suleyman’s private gardens separated their rooms. But like most kings and queens of the time, the couple spent a good deal of time apart, moving and working in separate realms.

  If Suleyman was responsible for the defense and administration of the empire, Roxelana was accountable for the smooth running of the domestic households of both the New and Old Palaces. As the mourning period for Mehmed came to an end, she perhaps spent more time than usual in the latter, overseeing the allocation of rooms and attendants to Mehmed’s daughter Huma Shah and her mother. The last women from the Manisa harem would be integrated into service in Istanbul or married to men in the sultan’s service (a skeleton harem staff had no doubt remained in Manisa to await Selim’s arrival). Roxelana would play a directing role in choosing and preparing other women for Bayezid’s harem.

  Roxelana was not the only high-ranking royal figure to spend time in the Old Palace during this period; so did Suleyman’s sisters, some of whom, widowed or divorced, returned to the capital. Even if they chose to reside in domiciles of their own, the Old Palace was a center of sociability as well as a resource for female medical care. An odd hierarchy of status appears in imperial expense registers that differentiated the princesses, women of royal blood, from the Haseki, a former slave: the princesses had the title “sultan” plus honorifics; Roxelana had neither of these, but what she did have was a superior stipend that bespoke her influence and, consequently, her numerous financial responsibilities.

  The daily stipend furnished to all members of the dynastic household served not only as material support for the expenses of office but also as an index of status. Roxelana’s far exceeded that of other women—a queenly 2,000 silver aspers a day (roughly thirty gold ducats). Her income is documented in the first extant Old Palace account register of Suleyman’s reign, dated 1555 to 1556. Bureaucratic practice combined both Istanbul harem residences into a single bookkeeping whole, under the rubric of the Old Palace, which still counted as the principal residence of women.13 Perhaps Roxelana’s residence in the New Palace was considered an aberration of Suleyman’s reign.

  Because Roxelana did not rely wholly on her stipend—most royal women had other sources of income—it was impressive more in scale than amount. The 2,000-asper per diem was ten times greater than the 200 received by the next-highest-ranking women, two sisters of Suleyman now resident in the palace—the widowed Shehzade and Shah, divorced and then widowed. Two junior p
rincesses—offspring not of a sultan but of a prince or princess—received one hundred aspers. Their “thinner” blood was mirrored in their identification not by name but by their royal parent: “the daughter of Shehzade Sultan” and “the daughter of the deceased Sultan Mehmed, may he rest in peace” (Huma Shah).

  Ranking lowest in the 1555–1556 register were ordinary concubine mothers. The stipend of Shah’s mother, a former consort of the mighty Selim I, was only seventy-five aspers daily, and Huma Shah’s mother received a mere thirty. Mehmed’s governess, however, received forty-one aspers, her fiscal status greater than the dead prince’s concubine. Stipends, it seems, indexed active power and present status in the imperial household where converted slaves might outrank princesses of the blood. The 150-asper stipend of the Lady Steward, administrative manager of the Old Palace and, like Roxelana and the governess, a product of palace training, gave further evidence of this principle.

  Woven into this fiscal hierarchy was a different ranking, however, one that distinguished royal blood from royal service irrespective of stipend. The title “sultan” and the formula “long may they live” accompanied the names of Suleyman’s sisters Shah and Shehzade, an acknowledgment that these daughters of Selim I carried the blood of the Ottoman dynasty. They, of course, had been born free. Roxelana, nameless, is listed merely as “mother of the royal children.” In the formal logic of the finance department, her elevation to freed woman and queen to the sultan was irrelevant to her essential status as his concubine. Suleyman’s regard for his favorite was apparently a nonfact in the canon of scribal practice.

  Stipends were not the only source of support. To varying degrees princesses enjoyed wealth in the form of inheritance from relatives, gifts of valuables, ownership of slaves and real property, and so on. Mihrumah, for instance, would become the richest female in the empire after her mother’s death, although she was arguably exceptional as the only surviving princess born during Suleyman’s long reign and, moreover, the offspring of an exceptional mother and father. Especially during the years when her husband Rustem Pasha occupied the post of grand vizier, their combined wealth was as outsized as their combined influence.

  Despite the large household over much of which she presided, Mihrumah spent a good deal of time in her parents’ home. Navagero noted that she “goes very frequently to the palace of the Grand Signor to meet with her mother.”14 One virtue of Roxelana and Suleyman’s multiple parenthood was that at least two of their children remained in the capital. Cihangir, the last of the siblings, was fifteen or so when Bayezid departed for Konya. As if in compensation for his ineligibility for governorship, the youth became his father’s close companion. Alvise Renier, resident Venetian ambassador in the late 1540s, noted that father and son were devoted to each other—Suleyman greatly enjoyed the company of the clever and talkative Cihangir, whom he took with him wherever he went. Perhaps because of his frequent public presence, some mistakenly thought the prince would graduate to governor, Renier among them: “Soon [Suleyman] will send him from the palace and give him a title as he has done with his other sons.”15 But it was not to be.

  Roxelana presumably discouraged any talk of a provincial post for Cihangir, and not only in light of his condition. She was doubtless as devoted as Suleyman to her youngest child. His birth several years after her first five arrived in rapid succession gave her more time to savor his early years. His affliction, moreover, necessitated a different bond than she had with the others. And now Cihangir could be his mother’s travel companion as well as his father’s, chaperoning her on her solo Anatolian journeys. In addition to the 1543 and 1546 visits to Konya and Manisa recorded in the latter city’s public register, they probably made additional journeys to the two princely courts. One ongoing attraction was the rapidly growing number of grandchildren for Roxelana and nephews and nieces for Cihangir to dote on. Bayezid is said to have produced eleven children and Selim seven.16

  Apparently an outgoing personality, the teenage Cihangir may have been the perfect uncle to his two little nieces Huma Shah and Aisha, the daughter of Mihrumah and Rustem.17 Huma Shah and Aisha were close in age and may have been educated together as they grew up. Their grooming and training was serious business, for the two princesses could expect marriages to top statesmen in which their partnership and political acumen would be critical assets. Just as Suleyman would supervise the choice of their husbands when the time came, Roxelana would in the meanwhile choose their governesses and tutors—or at least Huma Shah’s, as Mihrumah, like her mother, had opinions of her own.

  ALTHOUGH THE OLD Palace and Mihrumah’s residence were always homes away from home for Roxelana, the New Palace held a particular attraction for her in these years: the presence of her husband between his return from Hungary in November 1543 and his departure in late March 1548 on a new Iranian campaign. This was the longest period the couple had spent in proximity to each other. It was uninterrupted except for Roxelana’s trips to see her sons and Suleyman’s hunting expeditions and sojourns in Adrianople during which she, for whatever reason, might not accompany him. New forms of intimacy and companionship may have developed between them, while older forms intensified or became less important. The changes that middle age wrought in the sultan—in his demeanor, habits, and health—are well chronicled, but once again we are left guessing with regard to his queen.

  The sexual passion that was a driving force in Roxelana and Suleyman’s early years together may have grown into a comfortable intimacy. Or so the royal couple would want it to seem, for there was a customary reticence among the Ottomans regarding sexual desire at middle age. Not that sex between the middle-aged should or was assumed to cease, but one’s demeanor should suggest that it was no longer a preoccupation. This was the stage in life when one’s own children became the sexually active generation, giving life to their own families.

  Portraits of Suleyman and Roxelana, late sixteenth century. From Jean Jacques Boissard, Vitae et icones sultanorum Turcicorum, principum Persarum…, Franckf. ad Moem, 1596.

  It is hard to know if Suleyman’s subjects regarded his reputation for faithfulness and devotion to Roxelana as a virtue. They would not necessarily see constancy as a meritorious quality in a sultan, the size of whose harem signified his power to take other nations’ females captive and use them. As de’Ludovici reported in 1534, the year of the royal marriage, the consensus was that “the sultan has loved his wife very much from the moment he met her” and that “according to the rumors that circulate, he has never been together with any woman except her.” In the mid-1550s, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Archduke Ferdinand’s envoy to Istanbul, confirmed this view, at least partially: “It is generally agreed that, ever since he promoted her to the rank of his lawful wife, he has possessed no concubines, although there is no law to prevent his doing so.”18

  Alongside Roxelana and Suleyman’s long-standing affection and shared interest in the progress of their children, a new concern emerged during these domestic years—the vagaries of health that came with middle age. In describing the sultan as he observed him in the first years of the 1550s, Navagero reported that he suffered from gout and edema.19 When these maladies first affected Suleyman is not clear, but his lengthy respite from military campaigning in the mid-1540s may have been intended in part to address his physical well-being. During a winter layover in Aleppo during the new Iranian campaign of 1548, Suleyman would write to Roxelana that the pain from his gout kept him from walking. She dispatched a reply full of condolences and wishes for his recovery so that he might enjoy the hunting he so loved.20 Shortly after leaving Aleppo in June, Suleyman suffered an attack of illness that puzzled his doctors and would cause him to spend part of the second fighting season recuperating.

  None of Suleyman’s conditions was fatal, and at first they were episodic. However, any sign of his ill health was, for Roxelana, cause for anxiety. He would always be sultan, with or without her. Were he to lose her, he would doubtless always mourn her, but he would
of necessity carry on. But to lose Suleyman was for Roxelana to lose the fulcrum of her life. And while she was politically consequential as mother of three princes and a princess, without Suleyman she lacked the principal source of her protection—unless and until one of her sons became the next sultan. Roxelana must have felt trepidation every time Suleyman set off for war. His health, however, she could do something about.

  Suleyman clearly followed a medical regime prescribed by his doctors. Luckily for posterity, the ambassador Navagero reported at length on his physical appearance and his health, the latter being a subject of obvious concern to the Venetian government. Suleyman was thin and rather tall. In his dark-complexioned face Navagero saw “an admirable greatness together with a gentleness that makes him agreeable to all who see him.” The sultan was meticulous about his diet, rarely consuming meat and then only a small amount. Unlike in his days with Ibrahim, when feasting was more frequent, he now drank pure water beneficial to digestion, choosing among various springs according to the discomfort of the moment. Suleyman also took care not to remain sedentary for very long.21

  Supporting Suleyman in maintaining these good habits would be a whole bevy of palace servants, from the cooks in the imperial kitchens to the select pages of the Privy Chamber, who were entrusted with the sultan’s personal care both at home and on the road. His biggest booster, however, was surely his wife. We can imagine Roxelana consulting with the doctors, conferring with the kitchen, hectoring the pages, and most of all fussing over Suleyman. If her prayer-full letters are any indication, she constantly entreated God to keep the sultan healthy. Perhaps she too was experiencing the physical wages of growing older and appreciated the greater attention to dietary regime and exercise.