Ottoman History Podcast - Hürrem Sultan or Roxelana, Empress of the East

Episode Date: December 12, 2017

Episode 340 with Leslie Peirce hosted by Suzie Ferguson and Seçil Yılmaz Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we explore the life and times of Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, a slave girl who became chief consort and then legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566). We trace Roxelana's probable beginnings and the possible paths that took her to Istanbul, asking how she rose above her peers in the Old Palace to become a favored concubine and then the wife of the Sultan. We explore her relationship to other women at the Ottoman court, the politics of her motherhood and philanthropy, and her role in Ottoman diplomacy. In the end, Roxelana's work, her relationship with Suleiman, and the unusual nuclear family they created despite the otherwise polygynous patterns of reproduction at the Ottoman court would transform the rules of Ottoman succession, the role of Ottoman royal women, and the future of the Empire as a whole. The life story of this one remarkable woman sheds light on many facets of the history of the Ottoman Empire, showing how a single individual's story can serve as a lynchpin for grasping the complexities of an age. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. I'm Seychelle Yilmaz. And today we're very happy to welcome to the podcast Professor Leslie Pierce. Leslie, thank you so much for being with us today. Leslie, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. Professor Pierce is professor of history and an associate member in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. She's the author of now three groundbreaking books in Ottoman history, as well as many other pieces. Her books have won various scholarly prizes and been translated into many languages.

Her books have won various scholarly prizes and been translated into many languages. Our listeners may be familiar with some of her works, including The Imperial Harem, Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, and Morality Tales, Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Eintab. Her most recent book, Empress of the East, How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire, is just out from Basic Books this year in 2017. The book will soon be available in Turkish, Chinese, Polish, and Estonian translation, which seems very exotic. So today we're going to take up the figure at the center of the newest book, the eponymous Empress of the East, Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, who was chief consort and then legal wife of

Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I, often called the Magnificent, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566. Today we'll delve into the life and times of this remarkable woman and talk with Professor Peirce about how her story sheds light on larger questions about Ottoman politics, governance, and gender relations. So we have big dreams for this episode. So Professor Pierce, it's clear from your telling in the book that Roxelana was an important figure in Ottoman history, and yet we don't know much about where she came from or her early life. So what do we know about Roxelana's origins and childhood?

Well, as you say, we don't know much. I mean, the one thing we do know, and I say in the book, is that her family was almost undoubtedly Christian because of this pattern that the Ottomans were employing at the time of taking and using Christian males and females, converting them, training them, and the most promising then take on important roles. So she's one of those persons. I think it's pretty sure that she came from what was called Ruthenia in

the day, and probably from what is today the Western Ukraine. There's no proof of that, but that seems to be plausible. So that's what I wrote in the book. So how did she then probably make her way to Istanbul and to the court? The one thing we do know is that she was captured and slaved and somehow made it to Istanbul. But again, like her origins, that's not entirely clear. So I'm assuming in the book that she was taken by Tatar slave raiders. There's no proof, direct proof, but there's enough contextual evidence. How she actually got to Istanbul is not clear.

The pattern, which other scholars have shown, suggests that she may have been taken to Açıköy, which is an Ottoman center port on the Black Sea, or all the way to Kaffa, Crimean Kaffa, which is probably most likely. And again, I can't say, there's no evidence, whether she was chosen right then and there in Kaffa or Atchikov, recognized as a potentially promising individual and was purchased by agents of the palace. On the other hand, she may just have been a common slave who made her way to Istanbul and went on the block in the slave markets.

So we really don't know. And I think that's very interesting because if she was chosen for the palace or chosen by a slave dealer who thought she had talent and would have her trained for elite families or the palace, that suggests that she was protected from the beginning. But if she was just a common slave, good for her. And then she made it on her own. So Leslie, Roxelana had a very long trip to Istanbul, probably a very adventurous one, coming from a very small place into one of the biggest capitals of the world at the time.

What is it to be Roxelana? As you can imagine and construct from your sources, the moment that she ends up in Istanbul and later being placed in one of the most gorgeous palaces of the time in Istanbul. You know, I wish I had talked to you before I wrote the book, because I hadn't thought about tiny place, huge city. That's a really interesting point to make. That experience of just arriving in the city, even if she's for the palace, must have been overwhelming, must have been overwhelming. We can just let our imaginations go here. The fact that she was going to be sold, she's a commodity.

Was she protected? I mean, whether she had anyone supporting her is so hard to say. But what we know about her, and this is a big point of the book, it's so obvious, is that she was a survivor. So whatever factors overwhelmed her, she seems to have coped with them. I mean, we do know that in the end, she rises about as high as it's possible to go at the Ottoman court, right? So how do you think she did that? I mean, beyond sort of personal qualities, or what does that trajectory look like? How did she rise in the palace?

Well, first, she made high for the Ottoman court. I mean, she broke whatever glass ceilings there were and created a whole new paradigm of a political woman. Well, let's assume she's with other women. Perhaps she's been recognized as talented, potential talent. At some point, she shows that she can go far. And go far means become a potential concubine for the sultan. When and where and what she demonstrated to allow the people around her, that is her minders, her teachers, and perhaps high-ranking women in the harem, because that's where she's being trained,

when they recognize what is so hard to say. But she must have been the A student in the class, and she must have been good at engaging others to help her. So this is another thing, you know, I was very curious about, which is sort of what is her relationship to some of these other powerful women at the Ottoman court? I mean, including, you know, the mother of Suleyman, Hafsa,, Hafsa. And then later on down the road, some of the other concubines or consorts that she deals with. Hafsa, Suleiman's mother, must have supported Raksalana, whether she wanted to or not. So I

think that relationship was certainly a political one. Whether it was an affective one, whether they developed a loving relationship is very hard to say. There's a story that is told by one of the Venetian ambassadors, and let me just say that the Venetian ambassadorial reports are incredibly important for intimate details. He relays a story about a temper tantrum that Roxolana had. It's hard to say when, but maybe two or three years into her work as Suleiman's concubine, by which time she's the mother of one or two, or possibly three children, depending upon when it happened. So the story goes that one of Suleiman's political appointees has given him a gift of two Russian slaves. Russian here may mean Ruthenian, like Ruxolana's presumed origins.

When she hears this, she pitches a fit. I mean, it sounds like an absolute tantrum. And she's flinging herself to the ground. tantrum, and she's flinging herself to the ground. And you would think that in the protocol of the harem, that that would be an absolute offense towards the sultan and towards his mother, who was the head of the whole female harem. In fact, they seem to be quite remorseful, and they get rid of the two Russian slave girls. They re-gift them out of the palace. So that's a remarkable story, And maybe it does tell us something about Hafsa's protection of her. There's a possibility that she could have been pregnant too, which I suggest in the

book, which means that you definitely want to take good care of her and not upset her. I mean, what's fascinating about that is that it also gives us a hint perhaps at the kind of affective relationship that might have been developing between Roxolana and Suleiman. And one of the things you note early on in the book is that Roxolana and Suleiman constructed what you call a nuclear family in a polygynous world. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what that means and sort of what were the stakes of that for Roxolana and for Suleiman? Well, first we should say something about what the typical pattern was as Roxolana emerges into the limelight. For the last 100, possibly longer than that years,

before her advent, which is 1520, the royal reproduction was carried on through concubines, and the rule was that once a concubine had produced a son, she was no longer a potential concubine. Her role was to train her son to be the best possible candidate for the succession to the sultanate. She could have a girl, she could have two daughters, a son, and then she's out. And this tells you something about the role of concubines. They're slaves, right? They come in as slaves.

They learn Turkish. They learn politics. They are considered extremely important people in this process because they are entrusted with the training of a prince. So we have to recognize this tells us that this is a very valuable role, which would also tell us why somebody like Roxelana is being protected. It's a big mystery, and I spent a good deal of time pondering how I was going to write about this when Suleiman, and I'm giving him the agency here,

when Suleiman brings Roxelana back to his bed. Her first child was a son, Mehmet. Why does that happen? She has a daughter, Mehramah, but then later he calls her back again, and pretty soon it's becoming clear that he's just sticking with her. No other concubines, as far as we know. And this is a total break from precedent, right, where a concubine who had born a son would be sent back to the harem and would never bear another child to the sultan. This is a complete break. It's a complete break with a hundred or even longer tradition. And people noticed that. They didn't know what was going on. I mean, one of the outcomes of that for Raksalana was that they began to call her sorceress or witch. She had seduced the sultan,

you know, sorcered him, so to speak. So, I mean, going back to what this means for her, I mean, it's not what she's presumably been trained for at the get-go. And every step of the way, she's going to have to figure out how to deal with multiple sons. What is her future going to be? I mean, that must have been on her mind. She has six children. What is her affective relationship with Suleiman? I mean, in the beginning, what was she? I mean, we have to say it. She was a sex slave. We don't use that language normally as historians, but in today's parlance, this is what she was. She was trained to be a sexual vehicle to produce a son.

Whether she hated sleeping with Suleiman at the very beginning, we can't know. We just can't know. But at some point, there does seem to be a close relationship. This story that the Venetians tell about her hysterics, when she hears that Suleiman may get a new concubine, he's been given a gift, perhaps he will sleep with that woman, can suggest that she doesn't want to lose him. But it can also suggest that she's protecting her son. And she doesn't want more boys out there to be his competitor. This is a very fascinating story, especially the kinds of breaks that that it entails and that embodied in a life of a captured enslaved woman and her rise in the palace. And I would like to a little bit open this story to be able to contextualize what is it to be a woman and a female figure in the palace, by basically looking at Roxelana's, Hafsa's, other concubines' roles in shaping politics in this particular juncture,

is that also a break? Apart from the private lives of a concubine and a sultan, can we also talk about a break in the politics of reproduction, which book does a great job actually showing before and after and looking at trajectory. Can you please a little bit tell us about this? I think the breaks in Roxolana's own career, having more than one son, number one. Later on, when her son becomes old enough to follow the typical pattern, which is to be sent to a province to learn how to govern, and his mother goes with him,

that's another break. She ends up not going with any of her sons. Number three, and this is a very big one, Suleyman marries her, and to marry her, he has to free her. I think I am right in saying that no consort of an Ottoman sultan ever married him except Osman, the very first, in the very beginning of the 13th century. So this is a huge break. And then the last important break is that as his wife, she moves into the imperial palace. And now I need to explain about the palaces. And this goes to the question of women's training in politics. When Suleyman comes to the throne, it's been 75 years or so since, less than that, 50, I guess, since Mehmed the Conqueror first built a palace in Istanbul.

And then he built a second one, which is the one we know as Topkapı Palace. And so the first one becomes the female harem. And the second one is where the sultan lives, and it is the seat of government. Government offices are there. So Raksalana is being trained in the old palace. It's literally called the old palace. But then when she marries him, and this is like 16 years into her career, she moves in to the imperial palace, the Tokopa palace. This is radical. You have a woman in the heart of what has been an all-male environment. Now, the question is, how definitively did she move? And I think, and others have thought too, that she probably went back and forth.

Her kids are in the old palace. She's part of that harem. But gradually, her domicile, the quarters that belong to her, are enlarged to the point that by the end of the 16th century, this is a major office in the new palace, quarters that belonged to her are enlarged to the point that by the end of the 16th century, this is a major office in the new palace, in the Topkapi Palace. So this is probably the biggest thing she does. The most important thing for history that she does is establish the imperial harem as a legitimate political entity at the heart of government. There were people who criticized women being there,

but it stuck all the way through to the end of the empire. So Leslie, I want to ask you, and I don't know if this is an easy question to answer, but why did this reformulation of the relationship between sultan and concubine change when it did the way it did? I mean, why did Suleyman take a queen, in other words? Well, first, let's say something about what Roxelana did in her career. What were some notable achievements of hers and some notable establishing of new patterns for royal women? One thing she did, and I think we're going to talk about this a little later, was that she was a very prolific philanthropist. And she built a mosque foundation, which maybe we are going to

talk about. And she did then subsequently many things across the empire. That was not unusual for royal women. Royal women had built in the provinces before, but she was the first to build in Istanbul, and she was the first to have this continual career of being a super philanthropist. Less noticed, I think, is her diplomacy. All along, we've known that she corresponded with two kings of Poland. You can see that on Wikipedia. You can find the images of the letters. But she did other things too. And I think this is something I was very lucky to discover, is that she corresponded with a really important Polish queen, Bona Sforza. I won't go on with the story of Bona Sforza. I only discovered her late in writing this book when I went to a conference in Poland.

But that correspondence was very important. Bona Sforza's daughter was Isabella, who we can call her Isabella of Hungary. I won't go into the details, but she was a very important figure for Suleiman's diplomacy. So the picture that you're painting here is actually of, you know, a world of women writing to women that had real diplomatic and political import, right? And you mentioned in the book that the 16th century we could think of in some ways as an age of queens. You know, this is the time of Mary Queen of Scots, of Anne Boleyn.

I mean, so that there is this kind of moment in the 16th century where women are rising to the fore in a new way as political actors. So I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about how Roxolana fit into that world as maybe a way of helping us to understand, if not why Suleyman stuck with her, then at least why she was kind of the right woman for the times. than at least why she was kind of the right woman for the times? I want to start by saying I think it's a really interesting question as to whether Suleyman or Roxelana or the two of them talking together and thinking about politics and international affairs decided she needed to take on some of the roles that other European queens. And I should also bring the Safavids in here and Safavid Iran. Their women are also royal women are playing roles. So whether they deliberately decided her career should expand to do this

or whether it just sort of did naturally from moment to moment as need arose or it seemed good for her to pitch in, I really don't know. I think the real payoff of her engaging with some of these roles that put her into a broader, put her onto a bigger stage in Europe and also to the East, came after her death when her successors are picking up the innovation she made, and I'll say something about that, and really moving further. Her successors were corresponding with Elizabeth I, the Tudor queen. Can't get bigger than that, right? Exchanging gifts.

They're writing with her immediate successor is corresponding with Catherine de' Medici, and that correspondence is just amazing. You know, come and visit. Tell your son to do this. It's quite an amazing correspondence. So that's really, I think, a fascinating way to kind of end this half of the podcast on a cliffhanger. We'll come back in a few moments

and hear more about Roxelana's doings on an international stage, as well as her philanthropic work in Istanbul. موسیقی Τα παιδιά της γειτονιάς σου με πειράζουνε Πάλι μεθυσμένος είσαι μου πονάζουνε Hello and welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson, here today with co-host Satchelil Mas and our guest professor Leslie Pierce, discussing her latest book, Empress of the East. and our guest professor Leslie Pierce discussing her latest book, Empress of the East. So we've talked a little bit about Roxelana's early life, her trip to Istanbul,

and the way that she may have risen in the palace. We want to talk now about what she actually did when she got to the palace and came to power. So if you could tell us a little bit about what was her role in charitable giving and philanthropy? And could we see her as a kind of founder in a way of a new tradition of philanthropic women's politics in the Ottoman court? Philanthropy is something I really wanted to write a lot about in the book, because I don't think it's been recognized as a part of her career. New Scholarship, particularly the book by Yulru Nijipola about the great architect Sinan, has brought out many of the facts, and there's no way you can ignore that career. But to put it into her biography is something I really wanted to do, so I wrote a lot. So it's not that she initiated a philanthropic career for a prominent royal woman, but that she amplified it. And she

had Suleyman's support, obviously, in this. So the pattern before was that concubine mothers were expected to endow a foundation. And by foundation, I mean a mosque, a collection of buildings. A mosque would anchor it. There might be a madrasa, a college that would teach law, principles of religion, and other disciplines. Sometimes a primary school for the neighborhood. If it was a large and well-endowed institution, it might have a soup kitchen. This was a fairly normal feature for big foundations. And the big thing would be a hospital. And there are many other smaller endowments that royal women made. The point about Roxelana was that she did not follow the pattern of women before who built in the provinces, Manisa,

other different places where princes were living, and even smaller towns, and not quite villages, but across Anatolia. So her foundation begins with a mosque. Interestingly, the mosque is fairly modest. The other parts that will go up after the mosque were a madrasa, a lovely little primary school for students. And I just have to stop and say, I had a tour, so I got to see this. It had an indoor and outdoor classroom.

And so this lovely sort of angled roof above it in the nice way that the kids go outside. Then it had a soup kitchen, a really magnificent soup kitchen, and somewhat later, a hospital, which is a very important addition to the whole medical scene in Istanbul. So it wasn't in a prominent location, but the point was, and this was just not Raksalana's work, it was there from the get-go when the Byzantine city was conquered in 1453, and it was in quite bad shape. And the population was like 30,000 estimated, and many of the districts were just wrecked. So there's an aspect of urban development and restoration. So we have to think about this foundation as not just being these service buildings, but that it brings jobs.

I really got very interested in the jobs. And so all the labor that goes on in the building of it, and then the jobs, and then it becomes a small magnet in that part. A thing you also mentioned is that this may have been the building of this complex, this mosque, hospital, school complex, may have also been part of her kind of public diplomacy to the people of Istanbul, right? That as she took on a new role in the palace, she also wanted to demonstrate that she, demonstrate outwards to the people

that she was perhaps a new kind of female figure. Well, absolutely. This is the most important thing that royal women did publicly, and they gain reputations. I mean, if you go to Manisa today, you are going to see ones, you know, complexes were built in the 15th century, and everybody knows Hushnusha Sultan, and you know, Hafsa Sultan. I mean, these women's names are remembered. If these foundations had another name in the beginning, Hafsa, Suleiman's mother's foundation,

was known as the Sultaniya, you know, the imperial. But today it's Hafsa Sultan. I think two things were the goal here when women built endowments. It was to show their stature. They were powerful royal women with money to spend. But probably the most lasting and important thing is their local reputation. They did this for us. And I have to think that for Roxelana, it was the best thing she could do. We have a lot of negative comments about her in the writings of European ambassadors,

and her legacy has been one of a schemer, you know, a sort of a wheeler-dealer kind of person. But I think if people had gone around and taken popularity polls in, say, 1550, she would have done well in different parts of the empire. Because by that time, she had endowed shrines for saints. She had endowed in Mecca and Medina hostels for pilgrims on the Hajj. Later in her life, she built a really huge foundation in Jerusalem. So in different places, people are getting to know who she is. She's powerful, but appreciating the work that she's done.

So I think she was really Suleiman's partner in this. I also have to imagine that, you know, what a savvy woman in a way, right, to come to the court as a Christian concubine and then to, you know, at the height of your career, be building shrines for saints in Mecca and Medina. I mean, you can sort of imagine here the working of a kind of sharp political consciousness in other words. There's this story told by George Sandys. George Sandys is this English, I think, traveler, was he? I'm not, I don't remember. It's in the book. And he wrote a very negative story. He wrote a lot of negative things about the Ottomans, about how she wouldn't sleep with

Suleiman unless he kind of freed her and gave her money to build a temple, as he called it. So, you know, maybe there's a grain of truth in this, is that she held out and said, you know, if you're sticking with me, I have six kids. Can we imagine this scenario? I have six kids. I've done all this stuff for you. Man, I want a monument because I want my name, A, my name to be remembered. And B, I want to get popular among the people. I want to do good for the people. So I like that scenario. So there's that little story of had a grain of truth is tells us something. Yeah, absolutely. We'll talk more about Roxelana's legacy in this in the city of Istanbul today and then. But I would like to also bring in another aspect of the Haseki complex that it's this is Roxelana's mosque compound compound you mentioned something in the book and that was fascinating for me that it's a female space with some of the employers but also a space for the

inhabitants female inhabitants of istanbul it became a space for education for religious practices and so on so forth so i would like to is this intentional your thing has been calculated for by roxalana herself uh or is it just natural that whatever foundation that these royal women stars actually also in in one way or the other speaks to their female audience um and their popularity about women can we elaborate on that or even speculate about that? I think we have to mostly speculate, but there are these hardcore moments of evidence. So I'd like to start first talking about women's thinking about other women before we get to the complex. I mean, if you think that Roxelana and all these other women are in what is almost like a monastery for their training in the

old palace. There must be jealousies and tensions, but there must be a lot of sympathy and friendships and alliances. So you're used to working with women. You're used to having female patrons, and you're used to being a female patron yourself. So that is the quintessential female space in the, I think, in the entire empire, and you come out of that. So I think that's really important to keep in mind. So when she is planning her first foundation, she's recently married, she's just moving into the palace, it's the beginning of her career. How much novelty can she introduce into her own foundation? It's hard to say which of the spaces there were accessible to women. So I'm speculating in part, but I did talk to all kinds of scholars about this.

The mosque presumably was accessible to women for prayers in a separate space, you know, towards one side of the mosque. Presumably they could, speculatively presumably, they could go in in non-formal prayer offices and say a prayer. There was a well, there was a water source on the grounds of the foundation. And there is a reference to slaves and women, girls going in and getting water from the well. That was an open space for them, an acceptable space, at least for the girls, maybe not grown women.

Whether the soup kitchen entertained females, whether they were one of the people who had kind of a past, so to speak, is hard to say. But I imagine them going, and when there's leftover food, it's a dole, so going there. So it's hard to say, but I think that is probably true. There is one thing in the Endowment D which was very interesting to me, There is one thing in the Endowment D, which was very interesting to me, and this is perhaps the most concrete foundation for thinking about women's presence in that complex.

And that is, as she lists all the employees of the foundation, she has a kia tibet. That can only mean female scribe. I have never heard of a kia tibet, a female scribe, anywhere. And again, I was writing people, have you ever heard of this? Have you ever heard of this? No. So I do need to say something, is that I did not have access to the original deed. So I was working from a text that

was translating and transcribing. So somebody needs to check that. But I'm 95% sure that that's true. What does it mean to have a female scribe? Let's say that a scribe is not necessarily somebody who just writes. It's a bigger term, I think, in Turkish. Sort of a female administrator, somebody who's taking care of stuff but can put it down on paper. So was she housed?

Did she actually work at the complex, at the foundation? I don't know. She may have been a palace woman. But what did she do? Why would you have a female? That has to have been Roxelana's choice. And it's, you know, I hope other people think about what that woman would have done. So one interesting piece of the story of Roxelana's history is that she's been kind of blamed for the execution of Suleiman's eldest son, Mustafa, who was the son of her rival co-concubine, Mahidevran. So I want to talk a little bit about that story

and the broader question of Roxelana's legacy. How was she received in her own time? And then how has she been talked about by historians since her moment? Well, I think the execution of Mustafa is probably the biggest factor in her legacy then, and possibly even now. And now to fill in your listeners, Mustafa was Suleyman's oldest surviving son. He lost some to childhood disease. Mustafa's mother, Mahidevran, Mustafa's mother, Mahidevran, was a very important woman as the mother of a prince.

And their life story is the pre-Roxolana story. It fits that classic model of mother-son going to the provinces, mother being totally devoted to the son. We should also say that Mustafa was incredibly popular. He started to be popular when he was 12. And again, this comes from the Venetian ambassadorial reports that the Janissaries liked him. The Janissaries are this very famous infantry corps of the Ottomans who increasingly wield political power and sometimes revolt. and sometimes revolt. So Mustafa is very popular. Mahidevran is viewed with a lot of sympathy. People admire her. It's the old story.

Raksalana comes along and has all these sons, and that disrupts the whole question of the succession. Now Mustafa has two or three other brothers that he's dealing with. Raksalana never leaves Istanbul. There's a disparity, and there are two, I say, two kind of patterns going on here. So I argue in the book that Raksalana was not key in the execution of Mustafa. Suleyman executes Mustafa when he's just about 40 years old, when Mustafa is about 40 years old. People are writing, again, it's Europeans

because they will write openly about politics that Mustafa is going to be the next sultan. There is just no way around that. He is so popular. He is such a good potential sultan. So there's great sympathy, at least insofar as our sources tell us this. And so Roxelana has been blamed for this sudden execution.

I spend a lot of time, I don't think I'm the only person who's writing about this now. I'm not sure of other scholars' names, but really look at the circumstances under which Suleyman executes Mustafa. 1553, when the Ottomans are up against powerful Safavids on the east and powerful Habsburgs, particularly the Austrian Habsburgs. And this empire cannot be on a permanent fighting footing because they're just, this is the way the world is and we now have stable empires. So Mustafa, in a sense, was a scary candidate. And there was a moment in time in which when they're at war, it looks like the army will defect to Mustafa. So I argue that it was a decision,

a painful, probably horrible decision he had to make is that Mustafa was a threat to the stability of the empire. If Mustafa were to win, or if there were civil war with the other sons, that the empire could fall apart and then the Safavids and the, you know, the Habsburgs are going to invade. And I just have to say this, this was very hard for me. And I had to call my son and talk this through. I say in the book that Roxelana was inevitably guilty. I mean, she was there all the time promoting her sons. But as I say in the book, that was the job of a concubine mother, to promote her sons and

not to, you know, so that somebody else's son won't become sultan. So that was her job definition, as it was Mahidevran's job definition. Why do you think then people at the time and then historians later on were so eager to lay this kind of terrible deed at Raksalana's feet? I mean, is there something we can extrapolate here about the way that people think about powerful women? I mean, Raksalana broke the mold, as we've been talking about. And she broke patterns that people thought had made the empire successful. I mean, this old pattern of mother-son in provinces is obviously what worked, because Suleyman inherited a great empire. So I think you're probably right that there is natural resentment for her,

and Mahidevran looks like a safer woman. And I don't know if there was a sense of women out of bounds. Raksalana had too much power, and therefore she seduced Suleiman because no great male sultan would let a woman have this much power. I'm sure a certain amount of that is going on. I do need to say that we hear this a lot from Europeans, and whether Ottomans were saying,

the Ottoman populace was saying this. They certainly loved Mustafa and admired Mahidevran, but whether they thought that Roxelana was an out-of-control female usurper, I can't say. Throughout the book, one thing that fascinates me is that you're constantly cross-checking sources, the European sources, Safavid sources, Ottoman sources, historians who had written at the time, historians with the new findings in our time the the work itself the

questions that we are asking at the moment and whatever we are guessing speculating constructing has many layers of narratives so i would like to understand, really, the ways in which Roxolana is being perceived within all these different voices on the stage, with many different spotlights on these characters saying something about Roxolana. How do we understand it today? Writing this book was a challenge, because I hope, I assume and I hope that my academic colleagues will read it and maybe assign it. But I also was primarily writing for a general audience. And I want to say something about that because I don't think we do that enough in our field. And part of my mission here was to just get people to know more about the Ottomans.

I'm going to go off track here and say a little bit about my career. I didn't start teaching when I was 45. I didn't go back to graduate school. It was a later career. And I said to myself, get your tenure, write the tenure book, get your promotion, full professor, write that book, and then you're going to write a popular book because nobody knows anything about the Ottomans. You know what? It's like, what, 27 years later, nobody knows anything about the Ottomans. So I always wanted to write that book. And thank God I have a wonderful editor and publisher who kept encouraging me to make it accessible. I was hedging my bets all the way through by saying, perhaps, maybe, it was possible that it could have been that. And one day she wrote me, she said, I did a word search. You have 183 perhapss, you can have 20. And I had a lot

of encouragement from our Ottomanist colleagues to say, just write your story. So that was a tremendous challenge for me, which is why in some cases I was so tried to be meticulous about what actually happened, as in the execution of Mustafa and Roxelana's reputation. So the sources for the book were very varied. Some of them I was already familiar with from my first book, which when I wrote about the imperial harem. So I had used some European sources, and I should say something about these sources. Probably the most important and the most reliable are ambassadorial reports.

And because Venice was present in Constantinople before the Ottomans ever got there, I mean, the Venetians, in some ways, are most familiar and most prolific. We always have to remember that they are ambassadors writing home to the Venetian Senate who have particular interests. They are not complete stories. I don't get into the whole question of how reliable they are in the book, but I hope that I frame them so that readers can understand that they are not the whole story. The problem on the other side is that we don't have much written about Roxolana in Ottoman sources. And that's kind of a very basic assumption that you don't write about women. You don't write about men's wives, other men's women. And I want to put that in terms of women as well as their agency.

You don't disturb their modesty, their reputation by writing about them. They themselves are taking care to curate their own reputations as modest, honorable women. So you don't have a lot of writing, positive or negative. It's difficult to get a handle on her in terms of narrative writing and popular opinion. What you do have are documents. And this is the wonderful thing about Ottoman history, at least for this period, there are so many documents because the Ottomans documented everything. We have account books from the imperial harems. So we can see something about numbers, where they're living, structures, a little bit architectural structures. In her case, we have her letters to Suleiman, which were a huge payoff. They corresponded when he was at war.

Sometimes he went on long hunting trips as well. We don't have any of his letters, and we only have, at least as far as what's available in the archives, in the Topkapi Palace archives, some of her letters. She obviously wrote many, many more, but we have those. So those are wonderful. And you can see how she develops over time when she barely can speak Turkish

and she's just not saying very much to the end when she's telling him, you know, get it together, write me a letter. Istanbul is wondering what's happening where she is a real political person. So at this stage of our conversation, Leslie, I can't help but bring in the show of Magnificent Century to our conversation.

In the ways in which it also contributes a lot of popular understandings of Ottoman Empire and the time of Suleyman and Roxelana herself, as we know in the show, Hurrem Sultan. And the show itself had a fascinating career that is being screened in over like 60 countries and over 300 million people were addicted to show and there is there is this whole impact of the understandings of history, Ottoman history and Roxolana's story of our time that that show made its own print in it. And I would like to share with our

audiences one experience that I had that I shared with you beforehand. I used to live in Bushwick and there was this European market run run by and a very kind bulgarian man and and our conversations our our connecting point became magnificent century one day he saw me as i was trying to buy tulun peyniri and he said um do you know the show magnificent century and i said yes i'm not really following it oh what do you mean in bulgaria is so popular and i was able to bribe my mother-in-law to bring her here so that she would babysit our kid and i downloaded all the episodes and that was the bribe so i could actually met my wife and i could work together so in bulgaria in in other parts of the balkans in in the middle east in italy, and now through one of the big networks in the United States

that anyone can watch the show. So I would like to understand what the show, what kind of work it did and still doing through your eyes as the voice of Roxelana of our times today. Great question. First, I have to remind you, Sachil, when you were a graduate student here in New York City, you were one of two or three people who insisted I watch the show because I wasn't going to because I was going to write a pure book

and I didn't want to watch this show. So yes, absolutely. You made me do it. I love the show. I mean, it has some very poor production values. It's a soap opera. But it was really great for me. In the beginning, I even started, I watched the whole thing. Okay. And it's like 136 episodes and some are two hours long for our listeners who don't know it. I even started taking notes for my book.

And then I never used them. I learned a lot from it. And I have a whole paragraph explaining this in my book, in the acknowledgments. So many people have asked me, what did you think of the show? Okay, so I'm going to say what I said there, is that I learned from it. And the most important thing I learned from it, or I guess the biggest effect it had on me, was the degree to which it showed children. Children were ever-present, especially in Roxel and his life.

We know she had six kids. Well, so children. I paid a lot of attention to the children wherever I could. I worked them in. And naturally so. And I want to say something about writing history here. So this is a little bit historiography, historiographical. There aren't

an awful lot of sources about the children. So you, as an historian, you write about what you have source, what you have evidence for. And I'm like, I don't have evidence. There isn't a lot, but I'm getting those children in there. So I did to the degree that I could. So I thank the show for that. Another thing I need to say that I actually met the directors and I met some of the actors and was able to talk to them. So I was told that one of the goals of Meral Okoye, the original screenwriter, was to tell the story from the point of view of slaves. And I may be wrong in attributing the same intention to the directors, but I may be right about that. And as it opens, in the first 38 minutes, because I show these to students, you have Roxolana with the story of her abduction, enslavement, and her attitude. and you have Ibrahim who was a Greek slave taken from the Adriatic and became Suleiman's very close intimate friend and his famous grand vizier you have the story of these two slaves so I'm like

right on we're both we're doing the same thing here so I had a natural sympathy I think so I want to just close then by asking a sort of big picture question, which is why did you write this book the way that you did? I mean, how did this book come to be? When I decided to go back to graduate school, when I was 37, when I started, and 45 when I finished and got my first job, I think I knew by the time I had worked on or written the dissertation that, and I knew that I was going to have to write some books in the academic world, that I was going to write, when I could, a popular book or a book for intelligent, normal, everyday readers.

Because I wanted them to know more about the Ottoman Empire, I thought they should know more about Islamic societies, because, you know, they're so poorly represented to our population. And I thought, I just might want to write that book. So when the time came, and I had my professorships and all that, I thought, okay, how do I tell, how do I talk about the Ottomans, you know, and their government and how people lived, and I've already written two books about this. So I thought, this is the best story. What's the best story? It was in my first book. It's Suleyman and Roxolana. This is a story that maybe, it's a hook that real readers could read. But I think at the same time, I'd been thinking that, you know, we don't have biographies. I mean, think of the biographies we have. Especially of women. Of women. Ataturk, I mean, think of the biographies we have. Especially of women. Of women. Atatürk, I mean, you know.

Do we have Abdülhamid? I mean, we don't have too many, but do we know we have Halide Edip, but she's a Republic of Turkey figure. So I thought we need a biography. And yes, I just wanted to write about Roxelana because that's what I normally gravitate towards, stories of women.

And it's a great story. Professor Pierce, we just want to say thank you again so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me. And I just have to say this was a really challenging and stimulating conversation because I hadn't thought about some of the questions you asked me. So it was great. Well, we really enjoyed having you. And we hope that our readers will have enjoyed hearing more about the story of Roxelon and

Suleiman and that they will pick up a copy of the book Empress of the East which is out this year from Basic Books. I really think you know what we've done in this episode is to think about how to tell women's stories, women's stories in Islamic societies, women's stories from a past you know that's a little more distant from the present day through, you know, in this case, through biography, but also through a form of writing that makes these stories accessible to a broader audience and reminds us that, you know, Ottoman history, and this is something I think we all feel here at the podcast, Ottoman history can be something fun and entertaining and interesting and sexy, you know, for like anybody to get into. So I really encourage all of our listeners to pick up the book.

I think you'll walk away with that feeling as I did. We'll also post a bibliography for this episode on our website, www.OttawaHistoryPodcast.com, where we invite you to leave comments and questions. And also feel free as always to join us on Facebook, where we stay in touch with our community of over 30,000 listeners, and post news about upcoming series and episodes. That's all for this episode.

Until next time, take care. Thank you. Okay. Gacet eo, a-se a-frait a-se. © BF-WATCH TV 2021