Yes, it does, lady. The girl bit her tongue to keep the words from coming out.
“What upsets you? Leaving the harem?”
Yes!
“Leaving your grandmother?”
Yes!
“I do wish you would answer me. You are a clever girl. Surely you must realize that, much as she loves you, your grandmother cannot hold you close forever.”
Yes, she can.
“Will you always love me, grandmother?”
“Always.” Her grandmother’s voice echoed in her memory.
“Say you will never send me away from you.”
“As long as there is breath in my body, I will never send you away.”
Everyone in the harem knew that the Valide Sultan and her son, the Sultan, doted on the motherless princess. So everyone had left Saida to her grandmother’s tender care. At least they did until the Russian Kadin Hürrem began to cultivate the old lady and offered herself as a second mother to the Princess Saida — in her own words, “to add some joy to her life.”
“If you look through the slit in the curtains you will see the twin towers of the Gate of Salutation,” she instructed. “Over to the right, in front of the Hagia Sofia.”
Obediently, Saida peered out through the curtains.
“Do you see them? Are they not majestic? Oh, I do love this palace. The views. The gardens. So much more amenable than that dilapidated old wreck where we live. And so much closer to your father. Have you ever thought what it would be like to live in Topkapi Palace with him?”
A month ago, the question, coming at the girl unexpectedly, would have thrown her. And although this was their first time out together, she had had several weeks to get used to her stepmother’s abrupt twists and turns of mind. In truth, Saida had never given a thought to living anywhere but in the Old Palace where she was brought up. Why would she expect me to think about living in Topkapi? she wondered.
Unable to find a quick explanation, she neatly turned the question back on the questioner. “Have you ever thought about it?” she inquired sweetly.
“Oh, yes,” came the answer. “I dream about it. Every time your father invites me to join him there, I cannot help but think how wonderful it would be not to have to go back to the Old Palace at the end of the visit but just stay there, close to him. It is my heart’s desire. But I am fated to live out my days surrounded by women and gossip, with a city between us.”
The lady sighed and then shrugged. “Of course, it is very different for a princess. You will leave the harem when you marry. You will have a palace of your own with slaves to do your bidding and an obedient husband — he had better be or your father will have his head on a pike. Not like me, who will always be a slave.”
“But you are a kadin, a mother of princes.”
“Second Kadin,” Hürrem corrected her.
“But my father loves you beyond all women. I know that from his letters to you, the poems he writes to you, and the jewels he sends you.”
“I would give them all to be a simple wife, to live with the man I love as free women do, together with our children.” Hürrem’s face softened into dreaminess. “A royal family like the Osman clan was in the old days. Then you would be a true daughter to me.” She caught herself. “Of course you are like a daughter to me now, a beautiful daughter, but I see you do not share my dream. Perhaps I have underestimated your love for your father.”
“Oh, no, Lady Hürrem. He is the sun and moon to me.” This time Saida spoke without hesitation.
“Spoken like a royal princess.” The Second Kadin nodded her approval. “Your grandmother has raised you well. But I fear she has hidden you away in the harem too long. Perhaps it is time for a move.”
“Oh, no, I could never leave my grandmother. She has watched over me from the day my mother died. And, now that she is old and failing, it is my duty to stay by her side.”
“And she feels the same love for you. We have often spoken of you.”
“You have?”
“We two are of a mind, the Valide Sultan and I. She loves me because I have given her son two sons of his own to carry on the line should a calamity strike Prince Mustafa, Allah forbid. Your grandmother is a wise woman. She understands Ottoman ways. The First Kadin gave the Sultan only one living son. All the rest have died in the womb. I believe there is something wrong with her insides. With me, he now has three more sons and the succession is assured.”
“But my brother Mustafa . . .” Saida had lost her poise in the labyrinth of this conversation.
“Your half-brother Mustafa is the Crown Prince. The heir. And if it is the will of Allah, he will succeed his father when our beloved Sultan is . . . I cannot bring myself to say the words.”
“May God grant him many more years of health and strength,” Saida finished her sentence for her. But the princess’s mind was flooded with questions she dared not ask. There had been no mention of the other kadins. Or of the Valide Sultan. “What will happen to the harem?” she blurted out.
It was Hürrem’s turn to be confused. “The harem? Nothing will happen to the harem,” she replied. “It will remain in the Old Palace. All I’m thinking of is a special place for our family here in Topkapi Palace. And, by the way, if you are concerned about tradition, I must tell you that until a few decades ago, there were always women in Topkapi Palace. Did you know that?”
Indeed, Saida did not. And Hürrem was only too pleased to enlighten her. The Russian might not be literate, but she had made it her business to acquaint herself with the customs of her sultan’s people.
“You seem to think that my plan is some dangerous innovation. But in fact it is the revival of a tradition almost one hundred years old. Understand this,” she continued with a wag of the finger. “From the day your honorable ancestor, Mehmet, completed his palace — from the very first day — rooms were set aside for particular women that the Conqueror wished to keep close to him.
Believe me, Princess, I know my history. You have my word on it. There have always been women in Topkapi Palace.”
11
IN THE COACH
The Second KADIN’S research was faultless. There had always been women in Topkapi: unacknowledged, unofficial, but ever present. On the day that Mehmet, the Conqueror of Constantinople, decamped from his old palace in the middle of the city and removed himself to Palace Point, rooms were quietly set aside in his new palace for visits from his girls. He took with him to Topkapi his kitchens and his stables and his treasury and the school for his pages and his Great Council, the divan, and his cooks and his grooms and his household troops and his wardrobe and his dressers and his tasters and his barbers and his kennels and his hospital and, of course, his doctors. But his harem, the dwelling place of his women and children, he pointedly left behind in the Old Palace under the watchful eye of his mother, the Valide Sultan.
The Prophet himself declared, Heaven lies beneath the feet of thy mother. A man could have many wives and many slaves. He could cast off the unwanted ones and take others at will. But he could have only one mother. She occupied a unique place that nothing could alter save death. Who, then, could better be entrusted with his most valued personal possession — his women? Under the watchful eyes of a succession of Valides, girls from all corners of Asia, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire — taken as booty or sold into slavery by their parents or bestowed on the Sultan as gifts — were selected, groomed, educated, and finally presented to the Sultan by his mother for his approval. His selection having been made for him, he would then pay a visit to his harem for an afternoon dalliance.
But no man, least of all the Shadow of God on Earth and Master of Two Seas and Three Continents, relished being forced to mount a horse and ride halfway across a city just to spend an hour or two of pleasure. Or to announce the visit twenty-four hours in advance as protocol proscribed. Or to go through the elaborate ritual that these visits entaile
d: the girls lined up to greet him, to sing and dance for him, to joke with him, to serve him sherbets made with their own hands — much as he might love sherbet.
Then came the business of having to choose one girl over the rest and, after that, the interminable wait while the chosen one was washed and oiled, her body scraped free of every trace of hair with a sharpened mussel shell, her nails dyed, her underarms hennaed to ward off any sweat that might be generated by the act to come, Allah forbid. In spite of the Sultan’s exalted status as the Unique Arbiter of the World’s Destiny, the harem had its customs and there was nothing the Sultan could do to speed up the process but sit patiently sipping sherbet with his mother.
Before the reign of the Conqueror, things were different. The first Turkoman tribes who filtered down from Mongolia over the steppes of Central Asia were simple nomadic people seeking pasture land for their flocks. While searching for fresh fodder, they became aware of the riches passing along the Anatolian trade routes — silks, spices, and furs. Almost at once, the welfare of their herds began to take second place to the rich rewards of raiding for plunder. To these so-called march warriors, raiding soon became the business of life and booty, the prize. For them, home was now more often the saddle than the tent. In this uncertain world, the harem evolved as a haven where tribes of march warriors could sequester their women safely during their long absences.
In those early days, the Osmans were one of many tribes allied in a loose Turkic brotherhood ideally suited to casual brigandage. But the push westward soon had them nibbling at the boundaries of the Seljuk Empire, a vast territory that stretched from the mountains of Central Asia to the ancient ports of the Aegean Sea. Gathering around them a makeshift army composed of raiders, landless peasants, shepherds in arms, Sufis, and misfits, the Osman tribe began a westward trek that swept aside everything in its path. And somewhere on the long trek from the Caucasus to the Aegean, the Osman beys renounced their shamanism and became ghazis, fighters for the glory of Islam.
They were chewing up the old Roman Empire as if at a feast. Then down from his Asian stronghold galloped their fellow-Mongol, the dreaded Tamerlane. Like a thunderbolt, he decimated the Osman army, executed their sultan, and turned his sultana into a slave. By everyone’s measure, this ignominious defeat spelled the certain destruction of all Osman hopes. Yet in an astonishing show of resilience, a new Osman leader, Mehmet, arose from the ashes to repel the Mongol hordes. Then poised on the far western edge of Asia, Mehmet brought his army face to face with Christian Europe at its eastern extremity: Byzantium.
The outcome was inevitable. Constantinople had never recovered from its brutal sack by the marauding armies of the Fourth Crusade. Weakened to the point of paralysis by their Christian brethren, the Byzantines proved no match for the hungry Turkomen. Converging on the capital from north, south, east, and west, the battle-hardened central Asians drove from the field the last viable military remains of the once mighty Eastern Roman Empire. A pitiful remnant withdrew to the safety of their capital, Constantinople, to await the coup de grâce. On Tuesday, May 29 of the year 1453, Mehmet the Second captured the ancient city of Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul and erasing the last trace of a Christian presence in Asia.
Now the Osmans were indeed ghazis, not only in name but in fact. The nomadic Mongrel chieftain had emerged as truly a killer of infidels, a holy warrior, a Ghazi Sultan. Mehmet the Conqueror renamed the Osman family Ottoman and, seduced by dreams of empire, took on the additional title of Padishah — the Persian word for “emperor.”
Gradually the Osmans’ nomad tents gave way to palaces; their horses began to share primacy with gunpowder; their dervishes were folded into traditional Islam, now the official religion of the empire. And, since empires cry out for dynasties, the harem — that safe haven for warriors’ wives — took on a new shape as a hothouse in which to procreate male heirs to the Ottoman dynasty.
In this new imperial harem, each time the Sultan bedded a girl the event was entered in a velvet-bound couching book, a diary kept by the Chief Treasurer to establish beyond doubt the birth and legitimacy of the Sultan’s children. The name of the concubine and the precise day and hour of the encounter were meticulously recorded by the palace scribe and countersigned by the Sultan. There could be no margin for error when, any time the Sultan couched one of his harem concubines, the result might well be the birth of the next heir to the largest and richest empire in the world since Roman times.
Such a momentous outcome could not be left to the vagaries of passion. Or fancy. Or even pleasure. By the time the Conqueror’s great-great-grandson Suleiman became Sultan, copulation in the harem had long since been wrung dry of delight by the grinding machinery of protocol — officially. But unofficially, there were and always had been women in and out of Topkapi Palace.
This arrangement suited the Ottomans, as dedicated to Oriental formality as the Byzantines but also adroit at accommodating human frailty. Suleiman, as well as being the Shadow of God on Earth, was also flesh and blood. In emulation of his forefathers, he tended to avoid direct defiance of tradition. Instead, like his sires, he simply took what he wanted when he wanted it, leaving his courtiers to clean up whatever mess ensued. And, as long as he did not indulge himself too frequently or too blatantly, all eyes turned away, including the eyes of his mother, the Valide Sultan.
This style of accommodation also appealed to the Sultan’s subjects, a people at the same time hot-blooded and coldly formal, who had no difficulty rearranging the geographic boundaries of two continents, but who would resist to the death an alteration in the way a turban was wound. For the Turks and for the Sultan himself — who was, after all, one of them — there was no incongruence between the formal bedding practiced in the harem and the casual couplings in his private quarters in Topkapi Palace. A cart could be dispatched discreetly to pick up a small party of visitors (or, if the Sultan so directed, a single visitor) and bring the guests to his selamlik. Removed from harem protocol, what happened there need not be recorded in any book. If an inconvenient pregnancy were to occur, it would be neatly terminated by the court abortionist.
At the outset, when the Ottomans were still Osmans, they had contracted dynastic marriages with other ruling tribes. But by the reign of Mehmet, the Ottomans no longer had need of military allies, so they ceased to marry princesses and turned to concubines to produce their heirs. These girls, being slaves, came unencumbered by powerful and protective fathers and brothers.
And for one hundred years the Ottoman sultans lived two separate lives — the official one of the harem and the unacknowledged one of the Sultan’s selamlik — untroubled by interfering in-laws. Everyone knew who occupied the heavily curtained wagons that traversed the city streets from the Old Palace to Topkapi and back in the dark. But by common consent the identity of the occupants of the anonymous vehicles, indeed the ownership of the vehicles themselves, was not a subject for speculation. Not even thought of. Simply a fact of life.
But now, after more than a century of discretion, an intruder had disturbed the established order. A red-headed vixen not even beautiful, say those who saw her being sold in the slave market where the Grand Vizier bought her as a gift for his master. Somewhat skinny, more like a boy than a girl, they said. And with an unseemly air of flamboyance — almost defiance. Unlike the Circassian virgins traditionally favored by Ottoman Sultans ever since they began to beget children with slave girls instead of wives, this one was a Russian. With green eyes. She was called Hürrem, the Laughing One. Modest girls did not laugh.
In the streets and bazaars, heads shook at the mention of Hürrem — one day, a piece of bought meat, the next, a kadin, a Mother of Princes. Some say she bought filters and potions from Jewish peddlers that she placed in the Sultan’s mouth when she kissed him. And in the stews down at the port, where gossip was served and consumed faster than wine, they said she was a witch.
Of course a good Muslim did not believ
e in black magic. But, if not from spells and incantations, where did this Hürrem get her power over the Sultan? If not through witchery, how did she get his permission to show herself at the celebration of the circumcision of their sons (as no kadin in memory had ever done), where she sat enthroned on the balcony of the Grand Vizier’s palace while the crowd below gawked? True, she was veiled. Even so . . .
If the First Kadin, Rose of Spring, or any other Mother of Princes had taken such a liberty, she would have been tied in a sack full of stones and dumped into the Bosphorus. But for this Russian, it was not enough to be a kadin, the Mother of Princes. Although she had managed in short order to produce two sons, with another, by Allah’s grace, on the way, she still must take her place in line behind the mother of the Sultan’s first son and heir, Prince Mustafa. Like it or not, she was the Second Kadin. Yet she acted as if she were the First. And today she was taking a liberty that not even the Valide Sultan would dare. She had commandeered the Sultan’s gilded coach!
Without even a tugra to mark its owner as the Sultan, this vehicle had no need of identification. There was no other like it in the city. Nor, for that matter, anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. There was only one other in the world, owned by an Italian Marchesana named Isabella D’Este who captivated all Rome dashing about in it until, alas, the city was sacked by the Christian king of Spain and she was forced to flee for her life, sans coach. What the imperial mercenaries did with it during the sack of Rome, God only knows. Probably melted it down for the gold in the fittings. But years before the sack of Rome, Sultan Suleiman in connivance with his good friend, the Venetian bailo (they had since fallen out), arranged to have Isabella D’Este’s coach duplicated in the workrooms of Murano: a perfect miniature room on wheels with glass windows set into its gilded doors. Venetians could accomplish miracles if the price was right.
Somehow the bailo had managed to smuggle a pair of engineers into the Colonna Palace where the Marchesana was living to take the measurements of her coach. (Apparently, the Marchesana Isabella was not living in her own palace but was renting a palace from the noble Roman Colonna family. Imagine it! Renting out their palace like common innkeepers. The Sultan would never understand these Europeans.) And now Suleiman had his own golden coach, reserved solely for his use on those days when his gout was bothering him or when he simply chose not to ride his horse.
The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi Page 11