Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Roxelana and her entourage did more than satisfy the imperial harem’s duty in welcoming the defectors. Gifts reportedly worth the astonishing sum of 10,000 gold pieces issued forth. They included silk shirts for the prince sewn by the queen herself. The high value of the presents came in part from the lavish use of sırma, gilded silver thread, in the embroidery on other items of clothing as well as on quilt covers and pillows. For the women in the prince’s suite, Roxelana and her court provided gifts of handiwork adorned with the same gilt thread and bedding items including quilts and sheets, these with gilt-thread tassels.39 Countless hands were surely dedicated to the production of this armory of domestic comforts. The point was as much to generate talk of the queen’s fabulous generosity as it was to equip and delight the prince and his female retinue.

  The public was less impressed. Having been schooled in recent decades on the Safavid menace, people complained that Alqas was dangerous: he was a shi`i Muslim who “carr[ied] the virus of heresy and apostasy.” Both Selim I and Suleyman had waged long wars to push back the double threat—sectarian and political—posed by the Safavids. Suleyman apparently answered the protests with the comment, “We have done what was required to uphold the honor of the sultanate; we have entrusted his punishment to God the Almighty should he betray us.”40 The remark about betrayal turned out to be prescient, for in the end Alqas Mirza proved a severe disappointment to Ottoman hopes.

  The correspondence and exchange of gifts among queens, princesses, and kings was hardly trivial. The timing of Sigismund Augustus’s accession and the confirmation of peace it brought turned out to be serendipitous, for the arrival of Alqas Mirza spurred Suleyman to go to war with Iran for the second time in his thirty-seven-year reign. He and his grand vizier would be comforted by the affirmation of stability on the Polish front to the north. So no doubt were Roxelana and Mihrumah, who would find themselves alone among their family to stay behind in Istanbul. Selim, Bayezid, and now even Cihangir were drafted to participate in the new war.

  14

  SHOWDOWN

  ROXELANA WAS ACCUSED by her detractors of spurring Suleyman on to the Iranian campaign of 1548, one of his few flawed military endeavors. Ever eager for her sons to advance themselves, they alleged, she saw it as an opportunity for them to cultivate military favor. But it is more than likely that Roxelana opposed the war against the Persians, for it meant that Suleyman would be gone for almost two years. A compendium of sixteenth-century French diplomatic correspondence compiled in the mid-nineteenth exemplifies the evolution over time of Roxelana’s reputation as a manipulative schemer.

  In his forward to the documents he published, Ernest Charrière asserted that the campaign was the result of intrigues by “the sultana, absolute mistress of Suleyman,” who wanted him away from the capital in order to enhance the reputation of Selim, who would be his father’s deputy in Adrianople.1 But the actual correspondence among diplomats and the new king, Henry II, suggests the opposite. Jean de Morvilliers, French envoy in Venice, reported in February 1548 that the sultana, fearing “the many accidents” that could occur during such a long absence, strove with all her means to keep Suleyman from going. He added that the sultan loved her so ardently he was loath to part from her.2

  Suleyman’s return ushered in a three-year interlude during which husband and wife renewed their building efforts. But then the sultan would again depart for the east, to be absent from August 1553 until July 1555. These two years would prove especially difficult, bringing down upon Roxelana’s head the bitterest enmity she had yet experienced from the empire’s subjects. She would also suffer great personal sorrow.

  ADDED IN 1548 to Roxelana’s usual reasons to dislike Suleyman’s absences was concern about his health. In addition, the queen may well have shared the political objections voiced by Suleyman’s viziers. Although opposed to the eastern venture, reported the Venetian ambassador Alvise Renier, they were unable to dissuade the sultan. “This is one of his principal traits,” noted Renier of Suleyman’s determination to hold to his decisions.3 The grand vizier Rustem would afterward win esteem in the sultan’s eyes for having predicted the dubious results of the expensive expedition.4

  The two-season and nearly two-year campaign waged by Suleyman and his soldiers between spring 1548 and December 1549 met with limited success, making little overall headway against Safavid power. Worse, the assault would provoke Shah Tahmasp to strike back with punitive raids into Ottoman territory. If the Ottomans did come away with some gains—conquests in Georgia spearheaded by the vizier Kara Ahmed Pasha and the sultan’s own victorious siege of the fortress of Van—they did so despite Alqas. During the first summer fighting season he had to be dissuaded from massacring the population of Tabriz, and during the second he evaded Suleyman’s summons to rendezvous for fear of the sultan’s wrath. The hapless prince returned to Iran and begged his brother’s pardon, but Tahmasp ordered him imprisoned for life.

  Renier recorded an incident that Ottoman chroniclers were less apt to note: Janissary novices and junior clerics in Istanbul took advantage of Suleyman’s absence to commit acts of arson, their aim to plunder during the ensuing mayhem. A minor casualty of the arson was a workshop owned by Rustem Pasha.5 The destructive outburst recalled the events of 1525, when a Janissary uprising in Istanbul demolished several elite residences in protest against the prolonged absence of both the sultan and the grand vizier from Istanbul. The present disturbance would be of particular concern to Roxelana, who would not have forgotten that Suleyman, away hunting in Adrianople in 1525, had feared to reenter his capital. Now serving as his father’s deputy in Adrianople, Selim might be summoned by the Istanbul governor to add his heft and that of the troops under his command to a solution. As it turned out, the governor managed to quell the plot on his own, putting out the fires and publicly executing some of the guilty in the Hippodrome.

  The Istanbul incident did not make its way into a letter Roxelana dispatched to Suleyman during his long absence in the east. Curiously so, for in the past she had informed him of urban discontents. This time she may have wished not to worry him, or perhaps she discussed the events in another letter that is not among the few that survive. In any event, Roxelana had other unhappy matters on her mind when she composed her message.6

  Suleyman had obviously written to Roxelana of his physical troubles, and her letter was essentially a response to his. She returns again and again, in rather disordered prose, to his suffering. “In your noble letter, you said that your foot7 had been aching for a day or two. God knows, my sultan, I was so upset I cried.” Referring to Suleyman’s subsequent comment that he was feeling better, Roxelana inquires what caused the pain. She hopes that now he will be able to hunt. At the same time, she urges him to waste no time and make every effort to come home! This hopeful note is followed by her lament over the fact that Suleyman’s discomfort left him unable to walk. “Let me be the sacrifice [for your pain]!” she exclaims. Then, “please make an effort to send someone who can tell me of your good health and well-being.”

  This last train of thought—her great anxiety over the pain that kept Suleyman immobile and her plea for positive news—is reiterated, along with many invocations to God. Roxelana’s concern was not misplaced. Morvilliers would report in September 1549 that Suleyman experienced a persistent inflammation of his legs while the army was stationed in the eastern capital of Diyarbakır. The pain caused him to cry out so loudly that he could be heard throughout the camp, compelling his pashas to mask the sultan’s laments by summoning young men to sing and musical instruments to be played.8

  As usual in her letters, Roxelana moves on from the emotional and sentimental to more pragmatic matters. “You asked me to forward the document you sent me to my Selim Khan,” she writes; “I had already sent a porter to our Hajji Ali… but I will send this as you order.” Suleyman may have wished her to see the contents of the communiqué, or perhaps he entrusted more delicate information to courier links that went through the pa
lace to Adrianople. What Roxelana had already sent with the porter and what role the apparently trusted Hajji Ali played are unclear, but this rare aside points to the usefulness of the queen’s presence in the capital for private cross-empire communication. After Roxelana’s death, Mihrumah would assume this function.

  Finally, Roxelana provides, or rather the scribe formulates, rather stiffly, news of herself. “If you were to ask after your slave who is roasting in the fire of separation, it is due to the mercy of the Almighty and the prosperity of my sultan His Majesty’s reign that my health can be said to be agreeable.”9 In closing, Roxelana sends greetings to Bayezid and Cihangir and passes along the respects of her granddaughter Huma Shah, Mihrumah, and Gulfem, her good friend in the Old Palace.

  It is this greeting to Bayezid that dates Roxelana’s letter to Suleyman’s 1548–1549 winter layover in Aleppo between the eastern war’s two fighting seasons. Renier and other watchers noted that Suleyman had summoned the prince from his post in Konya to pass the season with his father.10 They made little mention of the fact that Cihangir had been with Suleyman since the two had marched out of Istanbul. However much pleasure this youngest, handicapped son brought to his father, his presence on campaign was not politically useful news. In times of war, it was the movements of Suleyman’s potential successors that concerned observers of Ottoman politics.

  Suleyman was apparently in good health at this point, for a great hunt was organized for March in the environs of Aleppo.11 Experts were recruited to drive quarry into the designated area from surrounding verdant spaces and the desert region that lay to the east and south of the city. Such massive hunts were no idle pastimes. As exercises in strategy and coordination, they kept the soldiers active and entertained. Invitation to participate was also a way both to honor local dignitaries and to introduce the princes to an important segment of the empire’s provincial leadership. The extended winter break would also provide sufficient rest and recuperation to prepare the sultan and his army for a second consecutive fighting season. The presence of his sons clearly added to Suleyman’s ability to build recreation into the routine of business that always followed him on campaign.

  Bayezid stayed in Aleppo until the army set out for the Ottoman-Safavid frontier in early June, at which point he returned to his post. A month later Suleyman crossed the Euphrates River to again head east. He intended to reunite with Alqas Mirza, but the Persian prince failed to appear. The Ottomans moved on without him.

  THIS EASTERN CAMPAIGN, the second in Suleyman’s career, was the first time that all the males in Roxelana’s family were away from Istanbul. Although she reserved her heartfelt expressions of “the pain of separation” only for Suleyman, she doubtless missed her princes. Bernardo Navagero, Venetian ambassador in the early 1550s, thought it worth reporting that she wanted her sons close to Istanbul.12 This wish doubtless contained a strategic element: proximity to the capital would be advantageous if a contest for the throne were to erupt. Meanwhile, she and Mihrumah were able to join Selim in Adrianople, returning to the capital in January 1549, when Suleyman’s deputy governor organized festivities to celebrate the empire’s prosperity.13 His aim was presumably to rally support for an unpopular war.

  Did Roxelana ever wish that the Ottoman sultans were more like their Persian counterparts, who took their women to war? Perhaps so, but then there was the cautionary tale of the wife of Shah Ismail, Tahmasp’s father, captured in the midst of battle by Selim I in 1514. Adding insult to injury, the sultan handed her over to one of his men as if she were an ordinary slave. If Ottoman custom required that Roxelana remain isolated from war, at least she now had two sons and a husband to write her news of their exploits. One would surely tell her the sad story of the elephant that had been acquired by the French ambassador Gabriel D’Aramon, who was traveling with the campaign. The poor creature expired from melancholy in Aleppo eight days after the death of its attendant, whom it loved and whose voice it liked to listen to.14

  The farthest that Roxelana had ventured into Ottoman territory was Konya, where Selim and then Bayezid were posted. She was surely inquisitive about Aleppo, the northernmost of the legendary cities in the empire’s predominantly Arab lands. This would be no idle curiosity, for the queen was no doubt contemplating sites for future philanthropic ventures in the old lands of Islam. Roxelana had already begun to plan for the welfare of the pilgrims who plied the Ottoman-secured routes to Jerusalem and Mecca. She would be aware that more people were finding it possible to undertake pilgrimages than earlier in the century, when the safety of the roads had been uncertain.

  The reference in Roxelana’s letter to the prosperity of Suleyman’s reign was no hollow compliment, for ever since his victory over Shah Tahmasp in 1535 and the capture of Mesopotamia, the whole of the Fertile Crescent had begun to experience rising standards of living. Aleppo was recovering its former status as an international trading nexus and on its way to becoming a major diplomatic nexus and third city of the empire after Istanbul and Cairo. The sultan and his sons would find more than the hunt to entertain them during their Aleppo sojourn, for the city’s intellectual and aesthetic appeal was considerable. The handsome physiognomy bestowed on the city by the great Mamluk sultans of Egypt was taking on Ottoman features, for Suleyman’s viziers were starting to build mosques and commercial complexes in the Ottoman style.

  If Roxelana missed her sons, she could take satisfaction in the knowledge that they were becoming familiar figures among the people of Anatolia and perhaps closing the gap with their long-admired half brother Mustafa. Suleyman had made a spectacle of his march to the east in 1548 by “inviting” each prince to stage a reception for his father along the route.15 Selim had the longest trek, traveling from his post at Manisa to the town of Seyit Gazi (near today’s Eskişehir). The itinerary was not unreasonable, for he would continue on from the reunion to wartime lieutenancy in Adrianople. Bayezid remained in Konya to greet the sultan, while Mustafa traveled from Amasya to the eastern Anatolian city of Sivas (Sebasteia to the Romans).

  These ceremonial events were calculated to radiate Ottoman strength, especially to Tahmasp, who was dealing with a rebel brother while Suleyman was showing off the three sons he had at his beck and call. (Tahmasp had other, loyal brothers and also sons, but that was not the point at the moment.) The villages, towns, cities, and fortresses that lined the princes’ routes to their rendezvous destinations composed another equally significant audience. Roxelana could participate vicariously in the receptions, or at least Selim’s, for the prince surely gave his mother an account of the Seyit Gazi celebration when he stopped in Istanbul en route to Adrianople.

  As for Bayezid, once in Aleppo he would participate in formal occasions and state banquets. While some divisions of the army were stationed in other winter quarters, Suleyman’s top officials had accompanied him to the Syrian city. Bayezid would attend meetings of the Imperial Council, possibly offering information about Konya and neighboring regions. The visit was an opportunity for Suleyman to appraise and augment the prince’s political skills.

  One highlight of the Aleppo interlude was the arrival of many gifts to Suleyman from Alqas. A veritable catalogue of the fabled riches of the east, Alqas’s offerings were the fruits of plunder gained from raids against his own relatives in central Iran: aloe, amber, and musk; muslins from India, shawls from Kashmir, carpets from Khorasan; weapons encrusted with diamonds and other costly stones; sacks filled with turquoise from Nishapur and rubies from Badakhshan.16

  Suleyman would likely present some of these riches to his queen. He might work some of the gemstones into jewelry for her (she had lost much finery in the Old Palace fire of 1541). Alqas had also sent precious books—exemplary copies of the Qur`an, collections of the Hadith (the oft-quoted sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), and fine specimens of the Shahnameh, the great Iranian epic poem penned in the eleventh century by the poet Firdausi. Many or perhaps all of these works would enter the New Palace library. Bayezid, a bud
ding bibliophile, was no doubt delighted; so probably was Rustem, whose estate was said to include 8,000 volumes.17 Illustrated manuscripts in the imperial library might circulate among a fairly wide range of palace readers, including women of the court.18 Perhaps Roxelana and her circle relished the Shahnameh’s cautionary tales of lovers and traitors. Other precious manuscripts might be carefully shown to little Huma Shah and Aisha, Mihrumah’s daughter, both now six or so, to instruct them in the history of great queens and kings.

  SULEYMAN AND ROXELANA were reunited at last in late December 1549. Soon after his return, both turned their attention to new building projects. The sultan finally ordered construction to begin on his own foundation in 1550. Rising on the third hill of Istanbul, the Suleymaniye, as it was called, would constitute the largest collection yet of royally endowed religious and welfare institutions. It would take seven years to build and cost a true fortune. But Suleyman had more than satisfied the Ottoman tradition that such colossal expenditures must come from revenues gained in new conquests.

  It was also in 1550 that Roxelana initiated work on the hospital that would round out her foundation in the Avrat Pazar district of the capital. The timing was not coincidental, for its construction drew on the resources already assembled for the Suleymaniye. The chief royal architect, Sinan, who had designed and built Roxelana’s foundation with the exception of its mosque, was in charge of both sites.

  Roxelana had not been an idle philanthropist since the opening in 1539 of the Haseki, as her Avrat Pazar complex was becoming known. One way she put her wealth to work was to underwrite foundations built by others. For example, the queen’s largesse provided financial support for the memorial mosque built for Prince Mehmed by his daye, the nurse-governess who may well have been at his side when he died suddenly in Manisa. The Lady Daye chose to situate her memorial in Kağıthane, today a busy district of Istanbul but then a village located on a stream running into the Golden Horn. Mehmed’s daye also built a primary school and endowed durable stone water troughs in the vicinity. When she died, she was buried in the graveyard of the mosque.19