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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Abducted by slave traders from her home in Ruthenia - modern-day Ukraine - around 1515, Roxelana was brought to Istanbul and trained in the palace harem as a concubine for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and one of the world's most powerful men. Suleyman became besotted with Roxelana and foreswore all other concubines, freeing and marrying her. The bold and canny Roxelana became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, helping Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women - Isabella of Hungary, Catherine de Medici - were increasingly close to power. Until now Roxelana has been seen by historians as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, acclaimed historian Leslie Peirce reveals with panache the compelling story of an elusive woman who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.
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‘A brilliantly researched account of the life and times of Roxelana, the extraordinary 16th-century Ottoman slave girl who triumphed against all odds to become a queen. Played out against a complex tapestry of exotic court life, rivalry, and passion, Leslie Peirce expertly sifts through the historical record, separating myth from reality to reveal the undeniable significance of this exceptional woman.’
—Nancy Goldstone, author of Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots
‘Anyone moved by seeing the tomb, surmounted by her turban, beside the Suleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, of Roxelana – the gift, then concubine, wife, sultana and “your lowly slave”, as she signed her letters to Suleiman the Magnificent – will relish her fascinating rise, described by Leslie Peirce, from Ruthenian-Christian obscurity to Empress of the East.’
—Nicky Haslam, Spectator ‘More Books of the Year’
‘Leslie Peirce’s erudition and long dedication to the study of Ottoman society and the imperial harem have yielded an engrossing and wonderfully readable portrait of Roxelana, embedded in the lives of her contemporaries and the tumult of her times. Peirce’s scholarly authority allows for a deftly crafted narrative: a lively, sympathetic and cautiously imaginative vision of the family at the centre of the 16th-century Ottoman world, grounded in deep social history.’
—Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford
‘Engaging…Peirce persuasively recasts Roxelana as a pragmatist adept at navigating both palace politics and international relations, and as a pioneer who established a more powerful role for Ottoman women.’
—The New Yorker
‘From harem girl to Ottoman queen – Roxelana is one of the most fascinating women of the 16th century. Leslie Peirce brings Roxelana to life as wife, mother, and sultana, and gives us a vivid picture of her Muslim world. A gripping and well-told tale!’
—Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
‘The fascinating story of one remarkable harem slave, who broke through [the] rocky ceiling, claiming unprecedented authority for women and forever changing the nature of the Ottoman government… This lively book resurrects Roxelana.’
—The New York Times Book Review
‘Leslie Peirce, one of the world’s foremost historians of the Ottoman empire, has created a brilliant, absorbing, and profoundly insightful account of one of the most enigmatically interesting figures of the 16th century: Roxelana, the captive slave who ultimately reigned alongside Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Peirce is rightly celebrated for her expertise on the fascinating subject of the Ottoman harem, and there is no one better qualified to help us understand how Roxelana emerged from the sultan’s harem to become one of the most powerful political figures of her times. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in understanding the deep history of Turkey, the Ottoman empire, and the Muslim Middle East.’
—Larry Wolff, author of The Singing Turk
EMPRESSOF THE EAST
HOW A SLAVE GIRL BECAME QUEEN OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
LESLIE PEIRCE
For Joanne, Lynda, Nancy, Linda, and the memory of Jude
This woman, of late a slave, but now become the greatest empresse of the East, flowing in all worldly felicitie, attended upon with all the pleasures that her heart could desire, wanted nothing she could wish but how to find means that the Turkish empire might after the death of Solyman be brought to some one of her owne sons.
—RICHARD KNOLLES,The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603)
Contents
The Ottoman empire in the reign of Suleyman I.
BEGINNINGS
1
THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE
This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans. The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia…. There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.
—Dispatch from the Genoese Bank of Saint George, Istanbul representative1
The Russian slave had been the concubine of Suleyman I, “the Magnificent,” for fifteen years when the royal wedding celebration took place in 1536. Like all concubines of the Ottoman sultans, she was neither Turkish nor Muslim by birth. Abducted from her homeland, the young girl proved herself adaptable and quick-witted, mastering the rules, the graces, and the politics that propelled her from obscurity to the sultan’s bed. She rapidly became Suleyman’s favorite, astounding both his court and his public. Sultans of the Ottoman empire did not make demonstrable favorites of their consorts, however much they came to care for them. But Suleyman and Roxelana became the parents of six children in quick succession, five of them sons. Some thought Roxelana used seductive powers, even potions, to induce the love Suleyman appeared to bear her. They called her witch.
Together the royal couple overturned one assumption after another. Roxelana was the first Ottoman concubine ever to marry the sultan who was her master. She was also the first to cut an overtly conspicuous figure. It was Roxelana who transformed the imperial harem from a residence for women of the dynasty into an institution that wielded political influence. Royal women following in her footsteps crafted powerful roles in Ottoman politics while serving as advisers to their sons and, in the seventeenth century, ruling as regents. When Roxelana died in 1558, she also left as a tangible part of her legacy numerous charitable foundations in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and across the empire—another break with tradition.
While there was no formal office of queen among the Ottomans, Roxelana filled this role in all but title, a formidable match for the great female rulers and consorts of Europe who shared the sixteenth century with her. But the radical nature of what can only be called the reign of Suleyman and Roxelana—a ruling partnership never repeated by the Ottomans—made her a controversial figure in her own time. The debate over her place in Ottoman history persists today.
Roxelana’s given name is not known. Nor are we certain of her exact birthplace, the date of her birth, or the names of her parents. But historical hearsay is plausible in her case because of the fascination she held for watchers of the Ottomans like the Genoese banker. Contemporary consensus held that she came from Ruthenia, “old Russia”—today a broad region in Ukraine—then governed by the Polish king. Europeans interested in her origins called her Roxelana, “the maiden from Ruthenia.”
The Ottoman name given to the young captive was Hurrem, a Persian word meaning “joyful” or “laughing.” Though she lived with this name for the rest of her life, she was rarely called it, except by Suleyman. Powerful people were known by their titles. To his subjects, Suleyman was “the Padishah,” the sovereign. As the monarch’s exclusive consort, Roxelana acquired the title “Haseki,” the favorite. When Suleyman made her a free woman and married her, she became the “Haseki Sultan” (the addition of “sultan” to a woman’s name or title indicated her membership in the dynastic family). This book calls her Roxelana, the name by which those outside the Ottoman world knew her and many still remember her.
Portrait of the young Roxelana, titled “Roxelana, wife of Suleyman.” Venetian School, sixteenth–seventeenth century.
Some Ottomans later came to believe that Roxelana was the daughter of an Orthodox priest—or so they told a Polish ambassador who came to Istanbul in the 1620s. But the only absolute certainty about the young captive is that her natal family was Christian. From the early fifteenth century onward, the sultans fathered all their children with Christian-born females taken from the empire’s borderlands or beyond. These captive females were converted to Islam and assimilated into Ottoman culture before they were chosen as royal mothers. Concubines offered the advantage of having no ties to Ottoman families who might challenge the dynasty’s dominance.
Roxelana had the good fortune to be chosen within a few months of Suleyman’s enthronement in September 1520 as the empire’s tenth sultan. He was twenty-six; she was seventeen or so. Suleyman had had other concubines before his accession, but Roxelana was the first partner of his long reign, and she succeeded in keeping herself the only one.
ROXELANA WAS A survivor. It was no small achievement that the young girl overcame the violence of her capture. She persevered through the perilous trek from her homeland to the distant Ottoman capital, where she embarked on the bewildering next phase of her life. The Ottoman name chosen for her suggests that she managed to put a congenial face on her fate. Roxelana’s aptitude for survival would soon lift her above the common servitude that was the destiny of most female slaves. She rapidly became adept at reading the political and sexual dynamics of the imperial harem—that private world of the sultan’s female relatives, concubines, children, and their many attendants. It was Roxelana’s charm combined with her savvy that enabled her to best the competition within the harem and to achieve the hitherto unknown roles of favorite and then wife and queen.
Roxelana and Suleyman shattered tradition by creating a nuclear family in a polygynous world. Until then, royal concubines had a single, well-defined responsibility. Once a concubine bore a male child to an Ottoman prince or sultan, her sole duty was to work toward the boy’s future political success. No conflict would arise here because the birth of a son terminated his mother’s sexual connection with her master. It did not matter if their relationship was one of passion, for tradition dictated that she bear him no more children. He would move on to a fresh concubine, while she remained with her son, her duty to raise him and accompany him to whatever provincial post he was assigned as prince.
These reproductive practices made uninhibited or prolonged relationships nearly impossible. Only if a concubine first gave birth to one or more daughters could her master continue to indulge any affection for her, at least until she bore a son. Hollywood stereotypes of lascivious sultans and their bevies of languid, sex-obsessed slaves only rarely held true for the Ottomans. Sex for males of the dynasty was a political duty as much as it was a pleasure. As with all hereditary dynasties, survival depended on the production of talented princes eligible to rule. As for the concubine, she was a sexual being for only a phase of her career but a mother for the rest of her life. Roxelana was both.
A royal concubine had to be physically appealing, for the arousal of desire was critical. (At one point in the seventeenth century, the newly enthroned sultan’s aversion to females temporarily imperiled the survival of the Ottoman state.) But the concubine also had to possess a keen mind and a capacity for political intelligence in order to successfully promote her son in a dangerously competitive world. Daughters also needed astute mothers who could raise them to be princesses worthy of the dynasty and loyal allies of their brother. The Ottomans believed that all princes, except those who were physically or mentally disabled, were born with the right to succeed their father. Here they differed from their European rivals, who practiced primogeniture, assigning only the eldest the right to rule. In the Ottoman view, competition among princes identified the successor best able to govern, defend the empire, and conquer new lands.
The birth of her first child, Mehmed, in the fall of 1521 thrust Roxelana into this sometimes fierce world. The contest for the throne demanded that the sultan’s sons be prepared to compete to the death, and so princes were bred to the honor of sacrificing themselves to the future glory of an empire painstakingly assembled by their ancestors. In theory, this intradynastic violence was institutionalized and limited to interregnums. Conflict was to be confined within the royal family, sparing the populace at large chronic civil strife such as the Wars of the Roses among claimants for the English throne. The formula worked, for fraternal rivalry had produced a chain of exceptionally talented sovereigns. But the violence sometimes spilled over into the public.
It was left to the mothers of slain princes to bear the burden of lifelong grief produced by this fratricidal system. The sultanate could not impose such a fate on a woman of distinguished pedigree. A slave concubine, on the other hand, could be enlisted in the precarious, if ennobling, career of mother to a prince. If Roxelana did not succeed in protecting her princes, she would carry the burden of more than one son’s death. As mother to a princess, she would not be banished from Istanbul in political exile, but she would suffer the disgrace of another woman’s elevation to the lofty position of queen mother of the Ottoman empire. By the time Mehmed arrived, Roxelana was certainly aware of her duty to succeed, but it is unlikely that she anticipated the lengths to which it would take her.
LIKE FOREIGN DIPLOMATS, the sultan’s subjects were confused by the peculiarities of Roxelana’s maverick career. She not only continued to live intimately with the sultan, but she also had more than one son to tutor for success. The public was used to the old traditions. (Among the Ottomans the vocabularies of tradition and law overlapped.) It was not surprising that many favored Suleyman’s oldest son Mustafa and the boy’s mother Mahidevran. Mustafa had arrived when his father was still a prince abiding by the accepted rules of reproduction. Now, as sultan, Suleyman had broken those rules. People focused their suspicions on Roxelana, for it would not do to doubt the mighty monarch. The slave had no family and no pedigree to protect her.
Across the globe, the times were ripe for blaming queens. In 1536, the year Roxelana celebrated her wedding, the Tudor king Henry VIII executed his wife Anne Boleyn, whom he accused of bewitching him—tricking him, that is, into falling in love with her.2 Suleyman never accused Roxelana of such trickery; nor did he share Henry’s failure to get a male heir from his favorite. Nevertheless, Roxelana could sympathize with Anne’s dilemma, for the public would compare her unfavorably to Mahidevran, her predecessor as royal consort, as England’s subjects compared Anne to Henry’s first, divorced wife, Catherine of Aragon. The extravagant devotion of powerful men, it seemed, had to be the fault of their female lovers. Even Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, has been popularly remembered for the talent of beguiling great Roman generals.
History has treated Roxelana cavalierly, for no one has yet told the story of her remarkable life from the perspective of a concubine. No one who wrote about her ever met her, except for Suleyman. He composed copious love poetry for his favorite, but none of his letters to her, written during his long absences at war, survive. Though the sultan’s subjects could be vocal about royal consorts, Ottoman chroniclers and commentators stayed silent on the subject, for social protocol frowned on speaking of the women of another man’s household, most of all the monarch’s. For the same reason, we do not know what Roxelana really looked like, although painters imagined her more than once. On the other hand, European observers of the Ottomans—ambassadors, merchants, travelers, and former captives—wrote extensive descriptions of the sultan, his palaces, his children, and their mothers. Their interest in the females of the dynasty, however, was confined to politics and power (including sexual power). Almost never did they mention the efforts that may have won Roxelana more admirers at home than detractors—her many philanthropic projects across the empire, for example.
The life of this elusive woman contains many blank spaces. This book cannot hope to fill them all, although it can and does suggest probabilities and imagine possibilities. Fortunately, Roxelana provided something of a record of herself. Although only a small number of the letters she wrote to Suleyman survive, they span four decades, from the 1520s, when she had gained enough familiarity with the Turkish language to muster a communication, to the 1550s, by which time she had become a master of politics. Her prose, lively and affectionate, helps us see why she acquired a name meaning “joyful.” Roxelana would prove tough-minded and ambitious, but she never seemed to lose her playful side.
We can also glimpse Roxelana’s character in the charter deeds she drew up for her charitable foundations. While not as intimate as her letters, they reveal her personal understanding of the Islamic mandate to give. She repeatedly insisted that the staffs of her foundations be just as dedicated to treating the needy with kindness and consideration as they were to dispensing relief to them. Her special benevolence toward slaves suggests that she never forgot her past.
Elevated to the position of the sultan’s wife, Roxelana recognized that she must give on a conspicuous scale. The Ottoman empire was populated almost exclusively by followers of the three great monotheistic religions originating in the Near East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each of which held charitable giving as a core tenet and obligation. Roxelana appears to have embraced the obligation wholeheartedly. But she was also canny enough to appreciate that displaying generosity toward ordinary people was the most effective strategy for gaining the esteem and gratitude that could offset any negative repercussions of her unconventional career.
Over the course of her life, Roxelana endowed mosques, schools, soup kitchens, hostels for travelers and pilgrims, sufi lodges, shrines for saintly figures, public baths, and a hospital modern for its day. Mothers of princes and princesses had erected notable philanthropic foundations before her, but Roxelana’s work far surpassed that of any previous Ottoman woman in volume and geographic reach. It set a model for future females of the dynasty that would trickle down through elite circles and out to women in the thousands of Ottoman cities and towns. Several of Roxelana’s monuments still stand today, and so do many of the monuments that her work inspired.
THE RUTHENIAN MAIDEN began her career as a hapless young girl forcibly drafted into the complex politics of the Ottoman dynastic house. Having lost her natal family, she spent the rest of her life in a perpetual quest to preserve and protect her new Ottoman family. But making a haven of domestic life was not easy when royal motherhood demanded partisan involvement in the treacherous politics of the throne. Protecting her sons was bound to pit her against Mustafa and his mother Mahidevran. Six years older than Mehmed, Mustafa had a head start. By the age of twelve, he was already popular among soldiers. The Ottoman army, especially the famous Janissary infantry corps, sometimes threatened to exert its will on politics.
When Roxelana came into Suleyman’s life, he had just inherited an empire that commanded the eastern Mediterranean seas, the Black Sea and its shores, southeastern Europe, and much of today’s Middle East. His great-grandfather Mehmed II stamped his coins with the phrase “Sultan of the two seas, Khan of the two lands.” Known among the Turks as “the Conqueror,” Mehmed had put an end to the millennium-old Christian empire of the Byzantines and made ancient Constantinople his capital. While Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II was more a statesman than a warrior, his father Selim I threatened east and west. In two long wars, Selim pushed back the rising new power in Iran and demolished the venerable Mamluk sultanate in Cairo. From the latter he took Egypt and the Levant, as well as the prestigious title of “servitor of the two Noble Sanctuaries,” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Selim was preparing to invade Europe when he died suddenly in 1520. The pope and several kings were said to be relieved when Suleyman ascended the Ottoman throne, for they considered him a novice at fighting wars. He would soon prove them wrong.
Starting with the wresting of Belgrade from Hungarian control in 1521 and the island of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John in 1522, Suleyman pushed the empire further into Europe and Asia and, within a decade, laid claim to the mantle of the Roman empire. Of the thirty-seven years Suleyman lived with Roxelana, he spent a total of ten apart from her on twelve different military campaigns. She missed him terribly, as her letters demonstrate, but there was much to keep her busy in his absence. The raising of their several children was an enormous responsibility. When her sons left home to embark on their public careers, she worried about them, and so she went long distances to visit them. In Istanbul, she had the company of her only daughter Mihrumah, who was famously devoted to her parents and equally treasured by them. Tutored by her mother in the dynastic responsibilities of royal females, Mihrumah would become the greatest of Ottoman princess philanthropists. She would also learn from her mother that corresponding with foreign royalty could sometimes benefit the empire in ways that diplomacy among men did not.
As queen, Roxelana kept herself occupied as mistress of the female court, receiving visitors and organizing celebrations to mark religious and social holidays. She had the palace harem household and its cadres of attendants and servants to oversee, though the principal responsibility for order and discipline lay with the palace staff of female administrators and eunuchs. It was Roxelana who ensured that talented harem women graduated from palace service to marriage with a deserving partner, generally an esteemed member of Suleyman’s government. She also managed the staff of male agents who worked for her outside the palace. The business of her far-flung charitable endowments in particular took up an increasing amount of her and their time. And as she acquired political acuity, she became Suleyman’s eyes and ears in the capital when he was away. Developing networks of contact and gathering intelligence became critical, including information that could be gleaned from female agents and female visitors to the palace. Following the death in 1534 of Suleyman’s mother Hafsa, Roxelana became Suleyman’s most loyal informant.
It was the demise of Hafsa, beloved by her son and a venerable figure, that made possible Roxelana’s marriage to Suleyman. Not that Hafsa necessarily opposed the union (there is, unfortunately, little to tell us what she thought of her son’s extraordinary relationship), but the politics of the court would not permit a concubine to rise above the status of the queen mother. Then Roxelana’s nuptials in 1536 literally opened the door to the New Palace, Suleyman’s own domicile, which welcomed her with an elegant suite of rooms adjacent to his. A cadre of attendants and servants accompanied her from the Old Palace, longtime home of the royal harem. Roxelana retained chambers in the Old Palace, however, for Hafsa’s death meant that she, as the top-ranking female of the dynastic family, was now responsible for the harem’s welfare.
Roxelana’s change in residence ushered in what was to be her greatest legacy: the transformation of the royal harem into a political force. Known today as the Topkapı Palace, the New Palace was a vast complex of structures built by Mehmed the Conqueror when his first royal residence in Istanbul (now the Old Palace) proved too small to house both his royal presence and the major offices of his government. Under Roxelana’s tutelage, the New Palace harem would expand rapidly and become, by the end of the century, a regularized institution in Ottoman government. The upper echelon of royal women now lived and labored at the political heart of the empire, while the Old Palace retained its stature as a training institution and home for retired harem women. Working from the New Palace, senior women developed networks that connected them with political allies on the outside, including foreign emissaries. Despite periodic outbursts of antipathy to female “meddling,” the harem’s practice of politics had become normalized, and so it remained throughout the life of the empire.
Roxelana died in 1558, leaving Suleyman without her for eight years until his death in 1566. She died with the comfort of knowing that one of her sons would succeed his father but also with the fear that the contest between them would be bloody. She would not live to know that the idea of a reigning couple—a sultan and his queen—proved too controversial for the Ottomans to repeat. After her, the New Palace harem whose rise she sparked would be headed by the queen mother. Nor did Roxelana know that she would gain both fame and notoriety in the centuries after her death through her depiction in European literature and opera and even through a modern Turkish television drama with an avid worldwide following.
Roxelana may have anticipated correctly, however, that the nature of politics at the heart of the empire would change. In fact, her career was proof that change had already begun. Even if there never was another queen, she and Suleyman set precedents that were still at work in their children’s and grandchildren’s generations. A more peaceable system of identifying the next sultan began to emerge from transformations in the practice of succession-by-combat that began with her. Roxelana helped to move the Ottoman empire into modern times, where treaty negotiations became as challenging and significant as victory in battle and domestic well-being occupied as much of the government’s attention as conquest. Bolstered by the reforms she introduced, the Ottoman sultanate would sustain itself for another three and a half centuries. All this was generated along with the Ottoman empire’s greatest love story.
Notes
1. Quoted in Young, Constantinople, 135.
2. Ives, Life, 296.
2
ABDUCTION
Roxelana’s cachet was such that more than one nation would lay claim to her. It was said, for instance, that she was Italian by origin, from Siena. Or perhaps she was abducted from Castel Collecchio in Parma in 1525 (when she was already the mother of three Ottoman children).1 The French never called Roxelana their own, but a popular belief held that the kings of France enjoyed a blood relationship with the Ottoman sultans. A French princess of the fifteenth century had allegedly given birth to Mehmed II, the conqueror of Byzantine Constantinople—or perhaps it was to his father Murad II.
The notion that a French princess was mother to an Ottoman son may have been far-fetched, but it was not entirely implausible in the fifteenth century. Ottoman princes were still making marriage alliances with foreign dynasties into the reign of Murad II (who died in 1451). The assertion of a blood tie perhaps looked quite appealing in the sixteenth century, when Suleyman and the French king Francis I began to cultivate a political alliance against their mutual rivals, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. But the suggestion that the Ottoman harem once housed a princess from France seems to have run its course by the late eighteenth century, when the French ambassador to Istanbul blamed Roxelana for propagating it.2 He found the idea that a princess could go missing absurd. It is surely a measure of Roxelana’s posthumous fame that she bore the blame for deeds that may never have crossed her mind.
More plausible assertions of Roxelana’s own origin came—and still come—from Ukraine and Poland. Neither claim negates the other, for she is widely thought to have been abducted into the slave trade from Ruthenia, a broad area that today encompasses western Ukraine but was then under the rule of the Polish king.3 Recently, with Ukraine’s achievement of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the new nation has embraced heroic figures from the past. In 1999, the town of Rohatyn, popularly alleged to be Roxelana’s birthplace, erected a lofty bronze statue of her atop a pedestal.4 (Rohatyn today is a town of close to 9,000 located some forty-five miles southeast of the historic city of Lviv.) Until more concrete proof surfaces, however, the assumption that Roxelana was taken from Rohatyn remains uncertain. But she is perhaps fortunate to have her memory localized and enshrined. Other well-known Ottoman concubine mothers seem fated to lack communities that might celebrate them.
While Roxelana’s Ruthenian origins seem reasonably certain, rumors about her birthplace gained traction because the precise origins of royal concubines were largely uncertain. The reason was that they were irrelevant. Natal loyalties had to be erased so that Christian captives could be turned into devoted servants of the Ottoman sultanate. And so slaves recruited to the service of the dynasty underwent a regime of intense instruction. Its goal was to render them speakers of Turkish, followers of Islam, and exemplars of Ottoman ritual and duty. Palace staff and teachers brought in from outside drilled Roxelana and her fellow recruits. Female slaves who would attend high-ranking women received more advanced instruction in dynastic etiquette. Especially well educated were candidates deemed eligible for the role of concubine, for their principal responsibility as future mothers would be to school their children to lead the empire.
The assertion of Roxelana’s Ruthenian roots came early in her career. In 1526, six years after she first became Suleyman’s concubine but before she was a widely recognized figure, diplomatic circles were informed that Suleyman now preferred a woman from Ruthenia. Pietro Bragadin, the Venetian Republic’s resident ambassador in Istanbul, described her as di nazion russa—of Russian origin—the word Rus then connoting Ruthenia.5 Bragadin was unlikely to report this fact without reliable confirmation by either someone serving in the imperial palace (perhaps a slave of Venetian origin?) or a trusted member of the embassy compound.
Because Venetian ambassadorial reports were consumed in Europe as models of diplomatic prose, the news of the sultan’s favorite would spread.6 When other Europeans in Istanbul began to notice and write home about her, they remarked on her “Russian” roots. The name Roxelana caught on when Austrian ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq called her Roxolana, “the maiden from Ruthenia.”7 His Turkish Letters, published in Latin in 1589, were widely read across Europe.
THE FATE OF the maiden from Ruthenia was entangled in the histories of several nations. Not only did the Ottoman sultanate figure in Roxelana’s destiny but so did the kingdom of Poland (from whose territory she was captured) and the Crimean Khanate (which did the capturing). More distantly, the ways of the Mongols and even the medieval empire of the Seljuk Turks before them echoed in Ottoman royal culture and a concubine’s place within it. Roxelana was only one of an enormous number of captives who passed through multiple hands in multiple lands, but her very journey seems to have catalyzed an innate sense of survival. The harsh conditions of the slave trade would teach her to fasten onto whatever element in the political repertoires of the region came to hand.
The line between raiding as an economic staple and the common practice of taking prisoners in warfare had always been a thin one among peoples of the Eurasian steppe. From the late fifteenth century onward, Ruthenia was among the regions ravaged by slave raids. The chief perpetrators of these sometimes massive expeditions were the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate. They were hardly the first to profit from the slave trade, a feature of the Black Sea region from ancient times. Rome and the Byzantine heirs to its eastern domains were major consumers, as was the famed Abbasid caliphate centered in Baghdad. The preponderance of Slavic-speaking peoples among the victims has given us the word “slave.”
In late medieval times, much of the Black Sea slave trade had been controlled by the colonies of two Italian maritime states, Venice and especially Genoa. Their near monopoly came to an end when Mehmed the Conqueror pushed them out around 1475 in his drive to establish control over maritime trade. The sultan also made a vassal of the khan of the Giray Tatars, who had recently established themselves in the Crimean peninsula, long an international crossroads, and its northern reaches. It was no coincidence that the seizure and marketing of captives became a staple of the khanate’s economy only a short time after the Ottomans imposed their semi-suzerainty. Istanbul was the single-largest market for the lucrative commodity, and its appetite for slave labor only grew over the course of the sixteenth century. In all likelihood, it was Tatar slave raiders who seized Roxelana from her home and family and cast her into an unknown future.
The Giray Tatars’ role in Ottoman history was disproportionate to their numbers. It was less their mastery of the slave trade, however, that gave them prestige in Ottoman eyes than their claim to descent from Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. This Mongol pedigree endowed the House of Giray with a lineage distinguished across the lands once ruled by the great khan and his progeny. Indeed, the prestige enjoyed by the Giray Tatars, who were Muslim, was such that it was believed they would inherit sovereignty over the Ottoman domain if its dynastic house ever died out.
Like the Tatars, the Ottoman sultans also looked to Central Asia as a source for political legitimation. They traced their genealogy not to Chinggis Khan, however, but to the quasi-legendary Oghuz, great khan of a large Turkic tribal confederacy. The Ottomans were not the first Turkish-speaking sovereigns to claim descent from Oghuz. So did the family of one Seljuk, who migrated in the late tenth century from Oghuz Khan’s home territory (in today’s Uzbekistan) to the Caspian shore in northeastern Iran. It was the Seljuks who introduced Turkish rule to the Middle East.
Moving westward into Iran and Iraq, the descendants of Seljuk carved out a domain that at its zenith in the late eleventh century stretched from today’s Uzbekistan to eastern Anatolia, from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf to (off and on) the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Although the Seljuk empire broke apart within 150 years, its several successor states perpetuated the formula that had helped to make Turkish rule acceptable in the heart of the Middle East. This was a region that had only known Arab sovereigns claiming descent from the clan of the Prophet Muhammad or Persian sovereigns who could draw on an ancient and glorified tradition of Iranian kingship. The Seljuks, like the Ottomans after them, had neither resource to validate their rule. As Turks, the Seljuks were outsiders, and while Muslim, they came from later converts to the religion.
And so the Seljuks adjusted the playbook. Their rulership would derive legitimacy from defense of the land and the religion. Military and governing authority would be theirs. They called themselves “sultan,” a title that connoted power, not heritage. For guidance and expertise in administration, they looked to the sophisticated cadres of native Persian political advisers, religious authorities, and treasury and chancery specialists. They also learned to be great patrons of the arts, religious learning, and the welfare of their subjects.
All this enabled the Seljuks to blend Turkish ideals of sovereignty with the classic kingly virtues of heroism, justice, and magnanimity celebrated in the region since antiquity. When, two centuries later, the Mongols entered Iran (one of the four sectors of Chinggis Khan’s empire), they too eventually made the same accommodation between sovereign authority and indigenous heritage. The Ottomans would do the same, cherry-picking elements of the Roman and Byzantine imperial pasts to add to the playbook they inherited from the east. As for Roxelana, she would manage her career with a quintessentially Ottoman approach, utilizing now this, now that tradition.
THE OTTOMAN STYLE of governing owed a particular debt to Seljuk history. Popular tales of the dynasty’s beginnings recounted the arrival in northeastern Anatolia of one Ertuğrul, a Turkish nomad chieftain who had come from the east along with “four hundred tents” under his command.8 Ertuğrul would go on to be remembered as the progenitor of the long-lived Ottoman ruling house. His son Osman, a local warlord who died in 1324, is counted as the first of thirty-seven sultans, the last of whose career ended with the demise of the empire in 1922.
Ertuğrul’s mythic journey took him all the way to northwestern Anatolia, not far from either the Aegean Sea or Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire. This meant passing through the lands of the Seljuks of Anatolia, a branch of the original Seljuk dynasty who had moved westward into the extensive Anatolian peninsula and there established a kingdom that outlived its parent state. A popular variant of the story recounting Ertuğrul’s arrival in what would become the Ottoman homeland features a direct tie between the Anatolian Seljuks and the birth of the empire: Ertuğrul joins the service of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan and receives as a reward the small domain from which his descendants would build a world empire.
Regardless of whether or not this particular legend—a story of migration—is true, large numbers of Turks did move westward, from the late eleventh century onward, rendering Anatolia increasingly Turkish and Muslim. The tale of Ertuğrul and the four hundred families is suggestive of the surge of many thousands who fled from the onslaught of the Mongols into the Middle East in the mid-thirteenth century.
One aspect of the Ottomans’ heritage, however, probably owed more to these newcomers from the east than to the Seljuks, who over time had assimilated to the sedate social habits of the Middle East. This was the public prominence of women. When the famous Moroccan world traveler Ibn Battuta visited the several new Turkish principalities springing up in western Anatolia, he remarked that women as well as men came out to hail him as he entered their towns and cities. This was clearly a habit he had not observed as he traveled in the old Muslim lands, from Morocco across North Africa to Egypt and then northward through the Levant.
Ibn Battuta provides us with a touchstone for the long and shifting history of Ottoman royal consorts and Roxelana’s pivotal place within it. He would learn firsthand in his northern travels that high-ranking women among the Turks and the Tatars might command public authority. When in 1331 he reached Nicea, a formerly Byzantine city recently conquered by Osman’s son Orhan, it was one of the latter’s wives, Nilufer, who welcomed the distinguished traveler. She was in charge of the soldiers stationed in Nicea while Orhan, whom Ibn Battuta called the richest of the Turkish leaders, was away on a tour of his fortresses. Of his audience with Nilufer, whom Ibn Battuta describes as “a pious and excellent woman,” he says, “she treated me honorably, gave me hospitality, and sent gifts.”9 Likewise, when the traveler continued on across the Black Sea to the lands of the Golden Horde Mongols, royal women, some of whom commanded their own encampments, entertained him lavishly.
Over time, however, the Ottomans, like the Seljuks, adopted more conservative social habits. Females of notable families began to mark their status by restricting their movements in public and employing servants to do their bidding. Men too practiced a studied aloofness, albeit to a lesser degree than their wives, with the prominent and the wealthy dispatching underlings to manage their affairs and receiving petitioners in their residences. First among Ottoman householders, the dynasty took the lead in this practice, with the effect that the sultan’s select appearances—attending Friday prayers, marching out of the capital on campaign—drew crowds of onlookers. The Ottomans were becoming expert at exploiting the politics of spatial manipulation.
These developments had consequences when it came to choosing ideal mothers of princes. During the first century, when the nascent Ottoman enterprise needed allies, princesses of neighboring dynasties, some of them Christian, made good wives and mothers. But when the sultans began to send their sons, and with them their mothers, to train in the provinces, foreign princesses were unlikely to relish leaving the Ottoman capital for distant and less cosmopolitan towns. It was also becoming clear, as the Ottomans became more of a threat to their neighbors, that a foreign princess’s loyalty might rest more with her natal family than with her Ottoman son. So by 1400 or thereabouts, the sultans began to look to slave concubines to assume the risky job of political motherhood.
It took the Ottoman populace a long while to discard the assumption that the mothers of princes and princesses were all royally born. This reluctance, present even today, helps to explain why legend has long claimed Suleyman’s mother Hafsa to be a Giray Tatar princess. Hafsa may well have hailed from the northern Black Sea region or even been a gift of the Tatar khan to the Ottoman court, but she was in fact a captive convert of modest origins, like virtually every woman in the imperial harem at the time when she entered it, probably the early 1490s.10
The tenacious story of Hafsa’s royal Tatar pedigree probably has something at least to do with a different sort of association she enjoyed with the Crimean Khanate. Hafsa accompanied Suleyman on his first political assignment as prince when in 1509 he was appointed, at the age of fifteen, to serve as governor of Caffa. The city was capital of a ribbon of territory running along the southeastern shores of the Crimean peninsula that constituted a province under direct Ottoman rule. In Caffa, Suleyman and his mother doubtless had contact with the Tatar authorities, perhaps with the khan himself.
DURING THEIR FOUR years in Caffa, both Suleyman and Hafsa would become familiar with the slave trade. Tatar slave trains were generally marched to the Crimean peninsula, and slaves were loaded mainly at Caffa onto vessels that would transport them to Istanbul. Caffa generated handsome tax revenues for the Ottoman sultanate, and it would be Suleyman’s duty as governor to make sure that revenue was safely channeled into the imperial treasury in the capital. The sums were staggering: in 1520, the year of Suleyman’s accession, Caffa’s slave tax amounted to roughly 10,000 gold ducats; combined with Caffa’s customs duties, this constituted the largest source of the treasury’s income (21,000 ducats).11 By 1527, when Suleyman and Roxelana had been together for six years, the slave taxes from Caffa and Kilia, another Black Sea center of the trade in captives, totaled 50,000 ducats.12
The captive Roxelana may well have followed the route from Ruthenia to Caffa. The first major Tatar raid into what is now western Ukraine occurred in 1468, when some 18,000 men, women, and children were taken prisoner. After that date, Tatar forays into either Polish or Muscovite territory continued on a near-annual basis, some reaping enormous numbers of captives.13 In 1498, thirty years after the first expedition, the region allegedly lost an unimaginable (and likely exaggerated) 100,000 to the raiders.
It is possible that Roxelana fell victim to an expedition mounted in 1516. Estimates of its captives range from 5,000 to 40,000 to an even larger, undetermined number.14 While the girl may very well have been abducted on a smaller raid in a different year (a Polish historian has suggested 1509, when her supposed birthplace Rohatyn was the target of Tatar raids15), the date 1516 is not implausible. Roxelana was probably no younger than seventeen when she became Suleyman’s concubine in the winter of 1520–1521 and thus around thirteen at the time of this raid. She would have been just old enough to manage survival on her own should she lose any relatives or neighbors captured with her.
The tactics of the Tatar slavers were described in 1578 by the Polish ambassador to the Crimean court, Marcin Broniewski. The raiding season was typically winter, when the freezing over of rivers and otherwise soggy terrain facilitated swifter advance. The Tatars moved quickly, noted Broniewski, laying waste to what they didn’t plunder. Prisoners were typically poorly fed and marched on foot, in chains. They risked physical abuse by their captors, while relatives who tried to ransom them along the way risked extortion.
To make it all the way to the Ottoman capital from Ruthenia was no small accomplishment for a young girl like Roxelana. Even surviving the long trek to Caffa was a hard-won trial. Evliya Çelebi, an Ottoman courtier famous for his extensive travelogue, witnessed a train of captives on their way to the city in the mid-seventeenth century. It was a wonder, he wrote, that any of them survived the march to the slave markets, so badly were they treated along the way.16
The trauma of the raids and of the multiple stages of captivity became enshrined in folklore. A Ukrainian folk song spoke of the devastation of the countryside:
The fires are burning behind the river
The Tatars are dividing their captives
Our village is burnt and our property plundered
Old mother is sabred and my dear is taken into captivity.17
A Kazakh proverb records the different fates that awaited young males and young females—“the son went as hostage, the daughter to the Crimea”—she to certain slavery, he to an uncertain future.18 And the physical journey from captivity to slavery is remembered despairingly in a Polish proverb: “O how much better to lie on one’s bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tatary.”19
The immediate destination for captives varied. Those taken from Polish lands might be marched to Ochakiv, a fortified city on the western Black Sea coast, from where most were shipped to Caffa. Many would be sold at the city’s slave markets, while others might be kept by their captors or sold directly, without the aid of dealers. The calculation probably took into account the fluctuating price of slaves—low, ironically, when a successful foray glutted the market with its harvest. Not all captives of the Tatars were for sale, for the khan was owed one captive in ten.
Once in Caffa, captives destined for sale would likely find themselves in the large complex that constituted the slave market. Some parts of the market dated from the era of the Italian traders (the thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries), while new facilities were added as the slave trade grew over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The slave dealers were primarily Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and some Italians—in other words, non-Muslims (the Tatars saw themselves as warriors and captors, not middlemen). Dealers typically purchased their merchandise in large lots and then separated the slaves by age, sex, and aptitude for resale, either locally or to other dealers for transport elsewhere.
This sorting process in Caffa probably resembled practices at the Tatars’ own large slave emporium in Karasubazar (black water market), located near the border between the khanate and Ottoman Caffa. Describing it, Evliya Çelebi wrote, “A man who has not seen this market has seen nothing in this world. There a mother is severed from her son and daughter, a son from his father and brother, and they are sold among lamentations, cries of help, weeping, and sorrow.”20 Of the Caffa slave market a European observer remarked in the mid-sixteenth century, “Herds of these unfortunate folks sold into slavery are driven onto the boats in Kaffa. Because of this practice the city of Kaffa may well be classed a heathen giant who feeds on our blood.”21
Roxelana was likely one of those unfortunates traveling across the Black Sea to Istanbul. If so, we cannot know if she made the arduous journey alone or had the good fortune to be accompanied by others taken from her community. Nor do we know if she was purchased directly by imperial agents in Caffa for palace service or merely shipped to the Istanbul slave market as a common commodity. If the former, she was no doubt protected during the approximately ten-day journey to the Ottoman capital, for other royal agents would likely have been on board in addition to palace slave recruiters. Merchants were frequently dispatched by the imperial treasury to the northern Black Sea region to acquire luxury items purveyed by Muscovy. These included high-quality leather and especially furs, with sable taking pride of place among the Ottomans. In 1529, for example, Suleyman allotted some 6,000 ducats for the purchase of furs.22 Goods for the sultan, material and human alike, were precious commodities.
EUROPEANS RAILED AGAINST the Tatar slavers. Their place was hell—the Tartarus of Greek mythology, the abyss below Hades where the wicked were imprisoned. The play with Tatar was obvious. But these critics were typically less concerned with the horrors of servitude than with the prospect of Christian captives converting to the “infidel” faith.23 Slavery was no stranger to them, for they had not hesitated to purchase human wares from the Black Sea purveyed by the Genoese and others. Only those Christians bound for Muslim lands seemed to give them pause.
Tirades against the Tatars were sometimes merely recited by rote, as is apparent in a treatise titled On the Customs of Tatars, Lithuanians and Muscovites, composed for the Polish king Sigismund I. Its author, writing under the name Michalon Lituanus (Michael the Lithuanian), repeatedly detailed the abuse of Christian slaves by their Tatar owners.24 Of slaves working Tatar estates, he wrote, “The best of these unfortunates, if they are not castrated, are branded on the forehead and on the cheeks and are tormented by day at work and by night in dungeons. Their life is worse than a dog’s.”25 Elsewhere, however, Lituanus noted that the Tatars treated their captives with consideration and freed them after seven years.
The author of the treatise is worth remembering, for this same Lituanus figures in Roxelana’s story. He was one of the first to publicize the belief that she was a captive from Polish-ruled territory. “The beloved wife of the Turkish emperor, mother of his eldest son and heir,” he reported, “was some time ago kidnapped from our land.”26 (The king of Poland was also the grand duke of Lithuania, hence the Lithuanian’s claim to “our” land.) The man behind the pen name Michael the Lithuanian is uncertain, but he may have been Vaclav Mykolaevyć, who served Sigismund as ambassador to both the Crimean and Ottoman courts.27 If so, “Lituanus” probably encountered this information regarding Roxelana when he traveled to Istanbul in 1538 with gifts for Suleyman.
The Venetian ambassador had already asserted Roxelana’s Ruthenian roots twelve years earlier. By the Lithuanian’s time, however, she was acquiring recognition as an influential figure in the capital, adding stature to her reputation as the concubine who had seduced the mighty sultan. Moreover, she was now married to him, her influence at court secured. With affirmation by their own envoy of this rising star’s origins, Polish authorities could envision scenarios in which Roxelana might be useful in keeping peace between Sigismund and Suleyman. For Sigismund had a delicate diplomatic balance to maintain.
On the one hand, the Tatars ravaged his lands. Adding insult to injury, they also demanded payment of an annual tribute, as they did from Muscovy. Not to pay was to risk the loss of greater numbers of countrymen and women to the slavers (Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” ruler of Muscovy, was so strapped for funds to ransom captives that in 1535 he asked monasteries to donate their silver to the cause).28 On the other hand, peace on the Polish-Ottoman frontier was a sine qua non for Sigismund. Even though the Ottomans regarded the Crimean Khanate as their ally, it was ultimately less risky for Poland to channel moral outrage at the Tatars. After all, the Ottomans merely consumed slaves—the Tatars manufactured them.
It is undeniable, though, that the sultans were wholly complicit in the slave trade. They openly backed the Tatar khanate of the Crimean, whose trade in captive bodies brought them revenue, and they routinely indulged their insatiable appetite for slave labor. Those same Europeans who castigated the Tatars for the suffering of Christian captives were also complicit, at least when it came to the Ottomans. What fascinated them, what they publicized, was not the dubious fate of Christian slave converts working for the sultans but rather the careers of those who rose to the top echelons of power. And so the legend of Roxelana would grow. The more famous she became, it seemed, the richer a backstory she warranted.
Almost immediately, Roxelana’s life became embroidered with fiction, for the simple reason that there was little fact to go on. In regions north of the empire, for example, the notion circulated that she was the key to the long peace that prevailed between Suleyman and Poland-Lithuania, as it was assumed to be her natal land. Ivan Novosiltsov, ambassador of Ivan the Terrible to Istanbul, claimed in 1570 that when her son Selim was born, Roxelana pleaded with Suleyman not to go to war with Lithuania because she had been born there (the story favors Selim because he was sultan during Novosiltsov’s visit).29
Roxelana was even more consequential in the telling of Samuel Twardowski, who composed a long poem describing the Polish embassy to Istanbul of 1622, of which he was a member. Published in Latin in 1633, the poem depicts Suleyman defending himself against the accusation of succumbing to Roxelana’s charms in maintaining his warm relations with the Polish king. Suleyman declares that his cordial dealings with the Polish king are not due to Roxelana’s allure but rather because she was herself of that royal lineage.30
Twardowski was also instrumental in propagating the story that Roxelana came from the town of Rohatyn and that her father was an Orthodox priest. Turks allegedly told him as much during his stay in Istanbul. Twardowski appears to have added on his own, however, that the priest was wicked,31 perhaps a reflection of his Polish and Catholic prejudice toward Orthodox Ruthenians.32 The notion that Roxelana’s original name was Anastasia Lisowska, another fixture in the lore surrounding her, appears to have originated in Ukrainian legend and folk song. (The name Aleksandra, also attributed to her, allegedly belonged to Anastasia’s mother Leksandra.)33
The most recent incarnation of Roxelana, in the Turkish historical television series Muhteṣem Yüzyıl [Magnificent Century], originally broadcast from 2011 to 2014, casts her as Aleksandra, daughter of a good priest, all of whose family is slain by her Tatar captors. And so she is likely to be remembered for now, for an estimated 150 million viewers worldwide have followed the series in dozens of languages. That Roxelana was and remains an object of such fascination is a testament to her extraordinary life.
Notes
1. Alberi, Relazioni, 3:102n1; Hammer, Histoire, 5:487.
2. Isom-Verhaaren, “Royal French Women,” 174.
3. The term “Ruthenia” has shifted over time with regard to the regions it refers to.
4. Halenko, “How a Turkish Empress,” 109–110; Yermolenko, “Roxolana in Europe,” 53.
5. Alberi, Relazioni, 3:102.
6. Valensi, Birth, 12–17.
7. Busbecq, Letters, 28,
8. Neşri, Cihân-Nümâ, 1:32–33.
9. Ibn Battuta, Travels, 2:454.
10. Uluçay, Padișahların kadınları, 30–31.
11. Inalcık, Economic, 284.
12. Halenko, “How a Turkish Empress,” 112.
13. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 580–582.
14. Ibid., 580.
15. Abrahamowicz, “Roksolana,” 543.
16. Evliya, Seyahatname, 5:213–214.
17. Quoted in Kizilov, “Slave Trade,” 1.
18. Golden, “Codex,” 40.
19. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 583.
20. Evliya, Seyahatname, 7:527.
21. Hrushevsky, History, 160.
22. Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Marchands,” passim.
23. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 585; Kizilov, “Slave Trade,” 13–14.
24. Kizilov, “Slave Trade,” 13–14.
25. Quoted in Fisher, “Muscovy,” 585.
26. Yermolenko, “Roxolana: The Greatest Empresse,” 234.
27. Kołodziejczyk, Crimean Khanate, 87.
28. Fisher, Crimean Tatars, 27–28.
29. Halenko, “How a Turkish Empress,” 114.
30. Twardowski, Legation, 225.
31. Abrahamowicz, “Roksolana,” 543.
32. Halenko, “How a Turkish Empress,” 114.
33. Yermolenko, “Roxolana: The Greatest Empresse,” 234.
3
INTHE OLD PALACE
Roxelana’s rise to prominence and power began in the grand residence that housed the women and children of the Ottoman dynasty. The Old Palace was a world of females and eunuchs. It was there that Roxelana began to learn the ways of the Ottomans. She would live in the Old Palace for some fifteen years, until she married Suleyman and began to occupy elegant chambers in the New Palace. Even then, she kept close ties with her original Ottoman home and continued to maintain quarters there.
Located in the bustling center of the imperial city, the Old Palace served as home for the sultan’s family—his mother, his concubines, and his children. Widowed or unmarried princesses of the dynasty might also live there. In much larger numbers, the Old Palace housed select female slaves in training, a sizeable administrative staff, and the legions of female servants who ministered to the women of privilege. As a new arrival, Roxelana would encounter a bewildering array of women of different ages, statuses, and origins.
The Old Palace was a well-protected bastion. A Venetian map published ca. 1530 shows a large parklike expanse in the middle of the city surrounded by a strong circular wall.1 Within it lay the “seraglio vecchio,” the Old Palace, its own enclosing wall reinforced with a double watchtower. Gardens and lawns filled unoccupied spaces, relieving the fortresslike feel of the whole complex—it had originally been designed as a well-defended residence for Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople.
“Byzantium or Constantinople.” Giovanni Andreas di Vavassore, ca. 1530. The Old Palace is located in the center, surrounded by angled walls; the New Palace is in the lower right. European communities resided principally in Galata (Pera), to the right, separated from Istanbul proper by the Golden Horn.
One of Roxelana’s first tasks as a novice in the Old Palace was to sort out the who’s who of its hierarchy. Mehmed’s division of the Ottoman royal household into two palaces, males in the New and females in the Old, opened up new opportunities for women to develop positions of influence. At the top of the Old Palace hierarchy was the mother of the reigning sultan, female elder of the Ottoman dynastic house. Second in command was the Lady Steward, mistress of palace operations and monitor of etiquette and ceremony. Experienced staff ran the day-to-day life of the palace, enforcing its rules of conduct and managing its finances. Some participated in the instruction and disciplining of new slaves. Trainees who showed aptitude were assigned to dress, coif, and sometimes entertain their royal mistresses. Those of lesser talent, grace, or good looks became domestic servants who fetched trays of food, stoked the fires that heated water for the hamams, tended wardrobes, and did the laundry and cleaning.
