Maximilian prepared for death, exhausted by the strain of defending his lands, suffering from an encyclopaedia of diseases from colitis to syphilis. He travelled with a coffin but planned for the future, negotiating one more double-marriage gambit: forging a Habsburg connection to the Jagiełło family that ruled Bohemia and Hungary. He married his grandson Ferdinand to the Hungarian princess Anne and his granddaughter Mary to Ludwig, king of Hungary. This could have led to a Jagiełło takeover of Austria but a tragedy meant that this union paid off too. Maximilian was the winner in the marital gambling stakes. In 1519, outraged that local tradesmen had refused him credit, he suffered a stroke, after which on his own penitent specifications, his body was whipped and teeth hammered out. His nineteen-year-old grandson Charles of Ghent inherited an empire that extended from Panama to Vienna, from Bruges to Palermo.
Soon afterwards, Selim, riding through Bulgaria, died either of skin cancer or of the plague. Having strangled so many members of his family, he was succeeded by the only Ottoman left alive, his son Suleiman, aged twenty-five, inheriting lands from Mecca to Hungary.
Charles and Suleiman believed they were universal monarchs of universal faiths; both faced militant heresies; both fought simultaneously on multiple fronts, land and sea. They looked immensely powerful but both had to navigate between competing interests. Suleiman could execute his viziers at will yet had to watch the Janissaries, the clergy, his local governors, his sons. Limited by the same laws and traditions that had delivered such extensive lands, Charles’s monarchy was woven into a tapestry of rights and institutions – assemblies, guilds, towns and republics with their own constitutions and customs, granted by earlier monarchs. They were frustrating for Charles but they made Europe peculiarly creative and dynamic. These sovereigns, rivals for almost half a century, both craved conquest, the mark of worldly greatness and divine favour.
Just after his accession, Suleiman, ‘tall but wiry, thin-faced, his nose aquiline, with a shadow of a moustache and a small beard’, reticent and inscrutable, stern and vigilant, met a Slavic female slave whom he named Hürrem – Joyful – for her looks and exuberance, though Christian envoys called her Roxelana – the Ruthenian: she would become the most powerful Ukrainian in history. That year, this priest’s daughter aged thirteen had been kidnapped from her village in a slave raid by the Crimean khan. Mongol horsemen seized good-looking children and enslaved them. Coffles of enchained slaves were marched across the steppe to Crimea where the slave market of Kaffa, seized from Genoa, provided the biggest component of Ottoman income – an empire funded by slavery. So important was it that Suleiman’s first assignment was to govern Kaffa, accompanied by his mother Hafsa, who herself had been seized on a slave raid. The first slave raid by the Girays in 1468 captured 18,000, but the raids kept getting bigger – one in 1498 was said to have taken 100,000. The number captured in this way is incalculable: one historian guesses ten million between 1450 and 1650, others suggest six and a half million between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. More obscure than its Atlantic equivalent – and not based on race – this slave trade was also vast, cruel and deadly for its victims.
Its slave markets were desperate places. ‘A man who has not seen this has not seen anything,’ as a Turkish traveller later noted. ‘There a mother is severed from her son and daughter, a son from father and brother, sold among lamentations, cries of help, weeping and sorrow’ – a scene similar to the tragedies of the African slave markets. Yet there were big differences. If they survived the journey across the steppe, there was a route out of slavery. An enslaved boy, converted to Islam and manumitted, could rise to grand vizier, while a girl, as Roxelana would now demonstrate, could end as empress.
Some time in his first weeks, Suleiman, who was ‘very lustful’ and frequently visited ‘the palace of the women’, was given a present of Roxelana. It was said that his intimate friend Ibrahim, a Greek fisherman’s son, was the giver. The enslaved Ibrahim, who spoke Greek, Turkish and Italian, had been fortunate to be presented to the young Suleiman, who promoted him fast to chamberlain and then, at the age of about thirty, to grand vizier. Jealously nicknamed Frenk (the Westerner) and Makbul (the Favourite), he would be architect of Suleiman’s expansion on three continents. His power would be enhanced if Suleiman’s favoured concubine was his protégée – provided he could maintain control of her. But no one could control Roxelana.
