Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Three postscripts contained more candid news for Suleyman and betrayed Roxelana’s worries. These were inscribed in the usual Ottoman epistolary style, running counterclockwise up the right-hand margin of the letter, across the top, and onto the reverse side. As she had done before, Roxelana reminded Suleyman firmly of the critical importance of positive news from the front. Given the general turmoil over Mustafa’s death and the concern that Suleyman was too old to fight, she would be right to think it was even more crucial now. What prompted the first postscript was the fact that the capital was unrealistically keyed up over a report that a messenger was on his way (in Turkish, the word refers to a bearer of good tidings). The long side note read,

  The city is clamoring that a messenger is coming, and everyone is getting ready to deck the city out. They are saying the messenger will arrive in two or three days and so they are standing ready to decorate the city. I don’t know if this is rumor or if it is true. Now, my sultan, it is very odd that a good-news messenger should come when you yourself are wintering in Aleppo. Furthermore, my sultan, neither the son of the heretic [the shah] nor his wife has been captured, nothing has been happening. Now if a messenger arrives saying “No progress here, nothing there,” no one is going to be happy, my sultan.6

  Roxelana had apparently been planning a visit to Bayezid in Adrianople. Now she tells Suleyman not to send letters there, since she has changed her mind and won’t go until she has heard from him. Again taking up the matter of the messenger, she wonders whose idea it was to dispatch him, for people have been questioning why the sultan would send tidings merely to announce that he was settled in his winter camp. She could not know that the eagerly awaited messenger was in all likelihood the courier who would instead bring her the calamitous news about her youngest son. How painful it would be for Suleyman to receive these anxious but still innocent words from his beloved.

  Letter from Roxelana to Suleyman, 1553. Her valedictory signature appears in the lower left corner: “And that’s that. Your lowly slave.”

  In the postscript at the top of the letter, Roxelana turns her thoughts to the impending war. She invokes divine support for the Ottoman venture, without which, it was believed, victory was impossible. “It is to be hoped, my sultan, that the Lord God brings that accursed one [Tahmasp] misfortune and failure,” she writes.7 “May the Lord God remove him to the place of Qarun [Croesus] and destroy him” (in the Qur`an, wealth and pride cause the earth to swallow up Qarun and his family).8 Roxelana then turns to her concern about the conflict. “If he [the Shah] has set out [on campaign], then whatever is possible will be done. If he hasn’t, please don’t send your noble self there.”

  Receptive as usual to the words of sages, Roxelana was apparently influenced here by the counsel of a seer regarding the advisability of the confrontation with Tahmasp. “Just now, my emperor, a great holy man has sent word that it would be better if His Majesty the Sultan didn’t go [to war] this year,” she writes, “[but] if he has already gone, it was God’s command, it was not forbidden.” Apparently the holy man was reassured by the size of the army and its ample supply trains. In Roxelana’s paraphrase, “By going with the soldiers and with the horses and the sheep, [the sultan] has headed off all kinds of misfortune and mishap.… With the help and grace of God, victory will henceforth be His Majesty’s.” She concludes, “This is what he said, my sultan, you know best.”

  The postscript on the reverse side of the letter was a plea on behalf of Rustem Pasha, still in semiexile on the outskirts of the capital, having lost the grand vizierate due to the furor of Mustafa’s partisans. “My fortune-favored, my happiness… Rustem Pasha is your slave,” pleads Roxelana. “Do not withhold your noble favor from him, my fortune-favored.” She is concerned that Suleyman will pay heed to angry sentiments lingering among the military and perhaps even his close advisers. “Do not listen to what anyone says,” she urges, “Let it be for the sake of your slave Mihrumah, my fortune-favored, my emperor, for your noble sake, and for my, your slave’s, sake too, my prosperous sultan.” This was a personal entreaty, but the politician in Roxelana would doubtless recognize that it was too soon to reinstate her son-in-law as the grand vizier. Perhaps she feared that Suleyman would find it necessary to sacrifice him to achieve stability while at war.

  Of Roxelana’s surviving letters to Suleyman, this one is richest in content. Some of its features are not new: she had been a barometer of the capital’s mood before, and she had conveyed the well wishes of spiritual figures before. Nor had she held back her opinions of Suleyman’s grand viziers (recall her postscript in 1526 telling Suleyman she would explain when he returned from Hungary why she was angry with Ibrahim Pasha). But this is the first time we see Roxelana openly pushing for a political favor from her husband. It is also the first time we see her palpably nervous, even agitated.

  Roxelana worried about Suleyman’s health—not only its fragility on an extended campaign but also its liability in the eyes of some factions in the army. This was not an overwrought concern, as an incident in Aleppo would demonstrate: when news of a death (Cihangir’s) began to emerge from the Aleppo palace, it was assumed that it was the sultan who had died. Suleyman was compelled to make a hasty appearance, leaning on a cane, to stop the Janissaries from ransacking the bazaars (they claimed plunder as their traditional right during an interregnum). “There was a moment when we feared for our goods and our lives,” wrote the anonymous Venetian who authored a long report on the eastern campaign. The loss was small, and the Janissaries were forced to return what they had taken, but they had effectively demonstrated their power to disrupt.9

  THE CONFRONTATION WITH Iran began in earnest in spring 1554, and the mood of the troops would now be tested. Even in death, Mustafa posed a threat, for his young son was still alive when the war began. The anonymous Venetian in Aleppo reported a widespread and openly voiced desire to see to the dead prince’s son on the throne. Roxelana and Bayezid, stationed in Adrianople, would be aware of this reality.10 It was as if many had come to regard Mustafa as the rightful ruler and his son the natural heir to the throne. Partisans and sympathizers within the army could cause overt trouble or might withhold the loyalty and discipline the Ottoman military was famous for.

  Suleyman himself very clearly understood the danger, for he rallied support in uncharacteristic sultanic fashion with “a very rare speech,” first in Diyarbakır and again in Erzurum, the two Ottoman military bastions in the east.11 At the open divan in Diyarbakır, he addressed not only his top officials but also numerous echelons of company commanders. He greeted his men, listened to their reports, and then explained at length why it was necessary to go deep into Safavid territory and how he had made every provision for their safety, expecting in return their devotion to the sultanate. Responding with fervor, the assembly enthusiastically pledged to follow their sultan beyond India and China, all the way to the mountain of Qaf (the legendary end of the earth).

  It helped that pledges were solidified with bonuses of 1,000 silver aspers to every soldier (possibly in lieu of the accession bonus they would have received had Mustafa become sultan). The process—rally and reward—was repeated in Erzurum when the forces arriving from Ottoman Europe met up with the main body of the army. Not coincidentally, it was at this time that the eunuch Ibrahim, now second vizier, carried out the order to kill Mustafa’s son Mehmed. Suleyman had waited until the troops were far away on the Iranian frontier. It would be too late for them to react as news trickled through, for a broken oath of loyalty could mean death. The campaign ended without major incident, although unwanted numbers perished in the east from disease and lack of rations.

  The military results were inconclusive. Suleyman and his commanders had failed to draw Tahmasp into battle. The Ottoman army instead invaded the Safavid frontier zones of Nakhchivan and Karabakh, only to find that Tahmasp had purposefully despoiled much of the region. The final straw was the destruction by the shah’s son Ismail of an Ottoman supply train coming fr
om central Anatolia. The two empires had reached a draw, proving themselves equally capable of deadly raids into each other’s territory but equally incapable of lasting conquests. Suleyman withdrew to Amasya to await negotiations for peace with the shah’s emissaries. He would turn Mustafa’s longtime capital into an arena of international diplomacy and thereby impress sultanic authority upon any lingering dissident sentiment.

  Finally concluded in April 1555, the Treaty of Amasya established a frontier between the two powers: the Ottomans had retained Iraq and most of Kurdistan, while the Safavids recovered the southern Caucasus and Tabriz, their capital city until the Ottomans had seized it in 1548.12 It was during the long negotiations with Iran that Archduke Ferdinand’s ambassador, the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, made his way to Amasya to sue for cessation of Ottoman raids into Austrian-controlled regions of Hungary. The negotiations with Ferdinand, however, would be drawn out until 1562. Busbecq passed some of that time as a hostage under house arrest, allowing him ample time to write four long letters that he would publish in 1581; widely read, they became a source of information (and misinformation) about Roxelana for future generations across Europe.

  Roxelana was doubtless overjoyed at her husband’s return to Istanbul in late July 1555. He had been gone one month short of two difficult years. That they could now mourn Cihangir’s death together was among the comforts of his return for Roxelana. The peace treaty in hand and the extended parleys with Ferdinand were another gift for Roxelana, since Suleyman would not be taking his forces to war again anytime soon. The truce with Iran would hold until 1578 and that with the Hapsburgs until Ferdinand’s death in 1564 and the accession of his ambitious son Maximilian II.

  Despite the several trials of the war, the Ottomans appeared as powerful and threatening as ever to their Venetian observers. The ambassador Domenico Trevisano explained to the Senate in late 1554 why no European state could defeat them: their full treasury could support a war at any time, and the sultan enjoyed a particular obedience and loyalty afforded him by each member of his army and navy. (The ambassador attributed the latter more to fear than to love and to the fact that the soldiers were slaves.) In the opinion of a Turkish acquaintance, noted Trevisano, the army was strong because it tolerated no wine, whoring, or gambling.13 Likewise, the anonymous Venetian in Aleppo wondered who could prevail against Suleyman and answered his own question: “All Christianity lives in division.” European princes thought of nothing but quarreling, preferring to take land from one another instead of defending themselves against the Ottoman sultan, he lamented.14

  The empire may have looked united to its rivals, but achieving a modicum of internal harmony would take some time. As Busbecq’s second letter, composed in July 1556, demonstrated, all attention was focused on Bayezid. Suleyman’s return from Amasya to Istanbul was marred by news of a pretender active around Salonika. Known to history as “Pseudo Mustafa,” he claimed to be Suleyman’s eldest son, another having been executed in his place. Considerable numbers of demobilized cavalrymen and assorted malcontents hastened to join his uprising, which was soon strong enough to threaten Adrianople. Bayezid, still his father’s deputy for the European domains of the empire, sent troops to quell the rebellion, appointed a local governor to take charge of the operation, and notified his father. The pretender was executed on August 18, 1555, not quite three weeks after Suleyman finally arrived home.15 But the affair did not bode well for Bayezid, for Suleyman came to consider the prince’s response suspiciously slow. Roxelana would find herself acting as peacemaker between father and son.

  Even though the pretender had no connection to Mustafa, certain of his supporters did, especially among the Ottoman cavalry. Some carried the soldier-poet Yahya’s elegy by heart as they returned from the Safavid war to their stations in Thrace and the Balkans. Unlike the Janissaries, urban creatures in peacetime, cavalrymen were denizens of the countryside, where they lived and served when not at war. Those who had fought in the recent conflict received their campaign bonuses only to learn that the most lucrative allotments had gone to Janissaries of the capital—as if the sultan had purchased loyalty at the center at their expense. Anatolian cavalrymen had been similarly disillusioned a few years earlier when Rustem had denied Mustafa’s appeals to repel menacing raiders from Georgia.16 This discontent among sectors of the cavalry would bear on both Bayezid’s and Selim’s futures, as the brothers now became each other’s sole rival for their father’s throne.

  SULEYMAN’S LONG ABSENCE in the east had not deterred Roxelana from pursuing her career as a patron. Apart from her family and her duties in the Old and New Palaces, fostering endowments continued to be the queen’s principal diversion from politics, and now she would claim another new frontier for Ottoman women. Palestine was her next destination. While the Haseki hospital was being completed in Istanbul, construction on a large and well-funded complex in the holy city of Jerusalem was beginning. It would not formally open until 1557, but its first structure, a kitchen, was distributing food to the poor by late 1551.17 The Jerusalem project would be the last major monument Roxelana completed.

  An assembly of structures and courtyards housed the several services provided by the foundation. Roxelana’s contribution to religious life consisted of a mosque and a fifty-five-room lodging for pious Muslims who followed a long tradition of taking up residence in Jerusalem to lead a life of contemplation. The foundation’s charter deed described this section of the endowment: “The illustrious donor has gratuitously built and embellished [a building] with fifty-five doors to high-domed rooms [that are] pleasant dwelling-places of firm structure and solid construction, and she has set them aside for those devotees who dwell in the holy precincts.”18

  Those holy precincts were visible from Roxelana’s complex. Located high on the slope of a hill, in the center of the old walled city, it had a clear view of the Noble Sanctuary, as Muslims called the Temple Mount. Holiest site to Jews, it was the third-most-sacred space to Muslims (Mecca and Medina were jointly known as the Two Noble Sanctuaries). On the Mount’s elevated platform stood three structures built by caliphs of the first Islamic century: the mosque of Al-Aqsa, a small prayer house called the Dome of the Chain, and the Dome of the Rock, a shrine that enclosed a great rock. Thought by Jews to mark the site of the First and Second Temples, the rock is believed by many Muslims to be the place from which Muhammad ascended in his night journey to heaven, where God instructed him on the correct manner of prayer. The striking visibility of the shrine’s golden dome makes it perhaps the most iconic feature of the Jerusalem skyline. The building’s brilliant tile facade was the work of Suleyman’s master craftsmen.

  As the charter described it, Roxelana’s foundation served the local community with “a spacious courtyard—a source of abundant favors—and beside it an exquisite specimen of a kitchen, a bakery, a cellar, a woodshed, privies, a refectory, and a store room.”19 Similar in makeup to the soup kitchen in Roxelana’s Istanbul complex, this one apparently fed more “poor and needy”—some four hundred twice a day.20 The final elements of the foundation were “a clean and fine caravanserai… and a spacious and tidy stable… for all those who travel and journey.” The travelers, like the poor and the devotees, presumably also qualified for the soup kitchen’s meals. Christians too may have been eligible—at least the charter deed did not exclude them, and the neighborhood was partially Christian.21 Since the 1920s and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Muslim Vocational Orphanage has occupied the premises, and the kitchen still provides nourishment to the poor.22

  The Jerusalem endowment could be called Roxelana’s crowning accomplishment. It combined and aggrandized two features of her earlier endeavors—the substantial soup kitchen in Istanbul and the hostels for pilgrims she had founded in Mecca and Medina. Her work helped to bring an Ottoman style of charity to the old lands of Islam by adding these two features to the classic formula of mosque and madrasa.23 Nearing her fifties, Roxelana was now building as a dynastic e
lder, no longer burdened by the potential for public disapproval that accompanied her Haseki foundation in the late 1530s. And once again, Roxelana’s projects dovetailed with her husband’s—in this instance the royal couple focused simultaneously on the most important cities of the Levant.

  Suleyman was at the time directing his own efforts to Damascus, having already delegated responsibility for Aleppo to his viziers. He first endowed a soup kitchen, completed in 1552, to accompany the shrine-mosque and hostel his father Selim I had constructed in 1518 in memory of the great sufi master Ibn al-Arabi (the mystic was believed to have predicted Selim’s conquest of the Arab lands). Then, in 1554, Suleyman undertook his own large foundation in Damascus. Situated on the route that passed through the Syrian capital and wound south to Mecca, it honored the critical role the city and its governors played as custodians of the annual pilgrimage.

  In Jerusalem, Roxelana exploited a specifically female identity that enhanced the reputation of her project. She was the third notable woman to adopt the site she selected. The first was a great lady of the eastern Mediterranean world: Helena, mother of Constantine, the Roman emperor who founded Constantinople. Allegedly an innkeeper when she became the concubine of Constantine’s father, Helena, like her son, converted to Christianity. In 326, the elderly empress famously journeyed to Jerusalem, where she is said to have uncovered sacred Christian sites and relics, most importantly the True Cross.24 These discoveries, for which Helena was later sainted, were a critical element in the revival of Jerusalem as an important locus of Christian pilgrimage.25 Constantine had the Church of the Holy Sepulcher constructed near Golgotha, its location also an alleged discovery by Helena. Near her son’s church was the site where she herself built a hostel for pilgrims.