The World полностью

In Constantinople, Roxelana was received into the female world of the Old Palace, the first built by Mehmed in the city centre, which was run by the sultan’s mother, the valide sultan, managed by eunuchs and inhabited by unmarried royal daughters, royal children, retired concubines and fresh young captives like Roxelana who were trained in needlework, the Quran, the Turkish language and sexual virtuosity. A girl started often as an odalık or servant and might never meet the sultan, spending her life until retirement serving the valide in this special world, ringing with voices in Russian, Albanian, Turkish, Italian. But Roxelana would have learned instantly that the power rested not in the female realm of the Old Palace but up on the acropolis in the male-dominated New Palace. Sophisticated, cosy, sensual, polyglot and obsessed with politics and its intimate avatar, gossip, the harem was a family sanctuary and power house as well as crèche, maternity ward, university and bordello. The hundreds of Russian-Ukranian, Greek and Italian girls were there to sexually serve the padishah whose duty was to father sons, from among whom the next ruler had to be chosen. Every girl wanted to be gözde – in the eye of the sultan; every odalık wanted to become a sultanic paramour, but their dream was to be umm al-walad – mother of an Ottoman son – with special status and the promise of manumission on the death of her master.

Roxelana had ‘beautiful hair’ – red-gold – which Suleiman praised. He moved her, travelling in a closed carriage guarded by uniformed eunuchs, into his Hall of Maidens, a micro-harem in the New Palace. After Suleiman had left to attack Serbia, Roxelana delivered a son Mehmed. He already had three sons by different odalisques: there was a rule that after the birth of a son the sultan did not return to the same odalisque, so that each prince would be supported by one mother. But when Suleiman returned after capturing Belgrade, Roxelana was recalled to the New Palace, where she was showered with jewels made personally by the sultan, who had learned the craft from Greek artisans in Trebizond. In between his military expeditions, they conceived a daughter, Mihrimah, and then three more boys.

Roxelana’s fertility and physical strength were remarkable, as was the survival of most of her children while epidemics killed two of Suleiman’s sons by other women. As Suleiman’s contemporary Henry VIII would soon learn, child mortality was high, and many women died in childbirth. Within five years, Roxelana was so powerful that when the sultan’s mother gave him ‘two beautiful Russian maidens’ she ‘flung herself to the ground weeping’ and made such a protest that Hafsa took the girls back. The sultan was committed to ‘my one and only love’.

As Suleiman was often at war, the two wrote constantly to each other. ‘My sultan,’ she wrote, ‘there’s no limit to the burning anguish of separation.’

When he teased her for not reading his letters, or ‘you would have written more of your longing to see me’, she replied, reminding him of their children: ‘Now, my sultan, that’s enough, my soul is too touched. When your letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you.’ But she does not conceal her playful impatience: ‘Their weeping has driven me crazy.’ His poems – written as by Muhibi (The Lover, perhaps her nickname for him) – hint at how she appeared to him: ‘My girl of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love with eyes full of mischief.’

‘I am happy,’ said this ruler of Olympian detachment, calling her ‘my most sincere friend, my confidante’. In the midst of interminable stress, he granted her the biggest compliment: she was ‘the only one who does not distress me in this world’. The padishah compared her not only to provinces he owned but to those he hoped to conquer – ‘My Istanbul, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia; / My Badakhshan, my Baghdad and Khorasan’. She may have been enslaved, but he called her ‘my sultan’: she was ungovernable. He signed off: ‘I’m your Lover, You bring me Joy.’

Both young monarchs surely needed such companionship to survive. Charles too would find consolation for the stress of his inheritance in a loving relationship.

CHARLES AND THE MANIKONGO