📚 REVIEW: Empress of the East by Leslie Peirce

A great biography describing how a European slave girl became queen of the Ottoman Empire and changed it forever.

Aug 20, 2025

Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire by Leslie Peirce is one of the better biographies I’ve read recently, especially when judged against the standard of “how long did it take me to finish?” I typically have several nonfiction books going at once, and I often find fiction more compelling, but I kept coming back to Empress of the East. It’s well-written, tidily organized, and doesn’t suffer from midlife doldrums; Roxelana’s life was interesting from beginning to end, and this book offered a much more well-rounded perspective into Ottoman history than most of the others I’ve come across.

Speaking of well-rounded, I should note that Substack informs me that 7,500 words is too long for email, so you should read it on the website.

I first learned about Roxelana back when I was teaching AP World History, but the nature of that curriculum is that one doesn’t get to dive deep. The book’s blurb is accurate to my experience when it says that in ‘mainstream’ history, Roxelana is presented as something on the order of an evil temptress witch.

Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

Her marriage to the sultan was a huge breach of Ottoman norms, to say nothing of the way she gave birth to multiple sons by him. Roxelana’s rise from captive to sultan’s wife transformed the dynamics of power within the Ottoman court for generations to come, permanently altering the traditional norms of succession and female influence.

There’s a clear sense in most of the curriculum materials that Suleyman was considered to be led by the nose by his advisors, and there’s a certain sense of disapproval at his weakness for falling deeply and lastingly in love with his concubine.

It is hard to know if Suleyman’s subjects regarded his reputation for faithfulness and devotion to Roxelana as a virtue. They would not necessarily see constancy as a meritorious quality in a sultan, the size of whose harem signified his power to take other nations’ females captive and use them.

Although I am always eager for stories of great men who actually loved their wives, Suleyman and Roxelana’s relationship is generally presented as a series of tragedies of judgment propped up by Suleyman’s military acumen.

Empress of the East, which focuses on Roxelana instead of Ottoman history or Suleyman himself, turns that narrative on its head without feeling like a feminist fantasy. It critically engages with Ottoman political and literary norms to unpack the subtleties of why contemporary writers blamed Suleyman’s slaves for his unpopular choices, and puts Roxelana in context with other powerful women from the region.

That’s the high-level review of the book, and if you want to go into it without spoilers, here’s an affiliate link you can use to buy Empress of the East. For the rest of you, here’s what I learned about the nitty gritty of Ottoman history in the context of Roxelana’s life.

I should note that before I read this, I knew almost nothing about the Ottomans except that they were Muslims who fought Christendom. I knew they were relatively tolerant of other religions within their empire, and that there was a famous ruler in the middle who married some a captured slave in a way that scandalized everyone because they thought she had witchily beguiled him into bad choices. So if you catch me saying something that isn’t right, please call me on it, because this is not my area of expertise.

Slave Raids in Eastern Europe

Like all concubines of the Ottoman sultans, Roxelana was neither Turkish nor Muslim by birth. She was a young Christian captive from Ruthenia, an eastern Slavic region roughly in the middle of modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.

Discussions of historical slavery are fraught. I’ve been online, and taught history in enough schools of enough varying demographics, for long enough to know that discussions of ‘who had it worse’ or ‘the relative ills of slavery are a spectrum’ are generally fruitless. But it’s impossible to discuss Ottoman history without some acknowledgment that slave raids were common in many places in many times. I was surprised to learn how bad the situation for slaves in Eastern Europe really was. I was even more surprised to discover that, etymologically speaking, “the preponderance of Slavic-speaking peoples among the victims has given us the word ‘slave.’”

I knew, from reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (I’m not done, but it’s a classic for a reason, here’s an affiliate link if you want to check it out), that life in the Slavic lands has been hard for a long, long time. But I didn’t realize just how thoroughly crushed between East and West the region really was, or how few damns most people gave about the actual people impacted. My primary prior knowledge about Eurasian steppe raids into Europe comes from the time of Rome, particularly events surrounding the Huns pushing the Germanic tribes west into the disaster that was the Battle of Adrianople.

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.

Given that Peirce is focused on Roxelana, it makes sense that she doesn’t go too deep into the history of the steppe raiders, but they’ve always been an interest of mine — for much the same reasons I find Roxelana so interesting. The steppe nomads produced a lot of powerful, interesting royal women — some of whom I wrote about in my article on The Diplomacy of Steppe Princesses. Empire of Horses by John Man (here’s an affiliate link, but note I haven’t finished reading it yet myself) is the best overview focused on early steppe civilizations I’m aware of, if you’re curious about things from their perspective.

Peirce is more focused on the impact of the raids on Roxelana’s homeland of Ruthenia. 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. From then “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.” “The raiding season was typically winter, when the freezing over of rivers and otherwise soggy terrain facilitated swifter advance.”

Europeans appalled by the horrors of Tartar raids were apparently “typically less concerned with the horrors of servitude than with the prospect of Christian captives converting to the ‘infidel’ faith.”

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.”

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.

It’s hard to say exactly how badly they were typically treated, though. Note the confusion here:

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.” Elsewhere, however, Lituanus noted that the Tatars treated their captives with consideration and freed them after seven years.

How does that compare to Roman slaves, with some dying in the salt mines and other rising to power as the pampered advisors of great lords? To slaves in the Americas, where the brutality of sugar plantations1 turned slavery into a trans-Atlantic horror?

It’s impossible to rank. But slavery is different in different places, and among the Ottomans it bore little resemblance to the sorts of slavery common in the Americas.

Since slavery among the Ottomans consisted predominantly of household (rather than agricultural) service, slaves’ duties tended to match their owners’ lifestyles […] emancipation after a term of service was common, at least among the wealthier Ottomans. It was one factor in their unceasing demand for slave labor.

One of the other factors comes from one of the most critical differences between American slavery and the Ottoman form: how to account for the children.

Islamic law, which provided protections for the concubine mother: she could not be sold or given away during her master’s lifetime, and upon his death she was automatically freed. This regard for the slave who bore a child to a free Muslim man stemmed in part from the fact that the law recognized the child as freeborn.

Harems as Educational Institutions

Roxelana first appears in the historical record as a slave in the Old Palace, also known as the royal harem, but fundamentally the female half of the royal household. It’s a mistake to think of it as just being a place where concubines lounged about raising babies and waiting to be called upon for sex.

The Old Palace was hardly sealed off from politics, as modern stereotypes of royal harems so often presume. It was politics, and it taught politics. Foreign envoys were wholly correct to consider the harem a vital object of diplomatic intelligence, for it generated its own news and even its own scandals.

Old Palace tutors drilled promising girls in languages, music, etiquette, and politics. The critical job of the harem was to train potential royal mothers, who were the chief advisors of royal sons and therefore, of potential sultans. A royal mother was the single most important person in a potential sultan’s life, responsible for enormous parts of his training over the course of his entire life.

The real job of royal concubines, once they had aroused their master’s sexual interest, was to bear and then to raise royal children. A sharp mind along with a savvy instinct for political survival was a sine qua non in a culture that trusted the mother of a potential heir to prepare him for the sultanate.

It was the mirror of the New Palace, which was an academy for training the most promising of young male recruits to Ottoman service.

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.

What’s fascinating is just how powerful the Lady Steward was:

the Lady Steward, the institution’s majordomo. In the 1555 register of palace stipends, hers is a lofty 150 silver aspers, three times that of Ali Agha, the highest-paid palace eunuch official (45 aspers).

The Ottoman royal harem was a bastion of power-brokering.

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.

But it really was as much an academy as anything else — and it wasn’t just aimed at producing queen mothers.

For its time, the Old Palace was a veritable institution of higher learning for women. It was the one place in the empire that offered a systematic education for large numbers of females. And it was international in its makeup, commingling individuals from Asia, Europe, and Africa.

One of the most interesting things about the Ottoman slave elite was the way it ruthlessly converted the captured youths to Muslim culture while leaving space for ethnic diversity to turn into a strength.

the culture of child raising in the Old Palace allowed a modicum of freedom for new mothers to follow the ways of their ancestors. After all, one reason for perpetuating the dynasty with slave concubines of varied origin was to exploit their very foreignness.
…
The Old Palace was, in today’s terminology, a multiethnic and multilingual institution where all were dedicated to mastering a new, shared culture of refinement. It was not wholly unlike European courts that attracted the daughters of ambitious noble families or even royalty. Such was the court of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, where Roxelana’s contemporary Anne Boleyn began to acquire her sophistication, or the French court, where Anne continued as lady-in-waiting in the queen’s household and Mary Stuart, widow to a French king and queen of Scotland, received a Renaissance education. The difference was that the Old Palace did not provide an education for women of notable Ottoman families. Rather, it created an educated female elite from a population of slaves, albeit a highly select one.

For centuries, the Ottomans cultivated a highly effective method of creating a meritocratic elite. This was a system in which being born into power — where even being born into the same ethnicity as your ruler — left you almost completely unable to actually exercise it at the highest levels… because you didn’t get to go to the very best schools, where the sultan trained his future bureaucrats, advisors, and war-leaders… or their wives.

Leaving aside politics for the moment, let’s take a look at the other skills women learned on the Old Palace. One critical skill was needlework. Books set in this time period tend to treat the lacemaking skills of royal women as a useless frippery, a way to show off. I see why, and it’s not unreasonable to think of the manual skills that royalty cultivated as a sort of signaling mechanism cum hobby.

Every sultan cultivated a manual skill, and his was the art of goldsmithing. He had allegedly learned his craft from a Greek master in Trabzon, the city where he was born and educated.

But sewing and embroidering were vitally important skills for all women in the sixteenth century. Textiles were critically important and extremely labor-intensive to make. Once they retired (or, in the worst case, expelled from the harem), palace women could generate income by selling their handiwork to Jewish tradeswomen.

Years ago, I read a book called The Golden Thread by Kassia St. Claire. It was an engaging deep dive into how fabric changed history that taught me a ton about the technological and economic importance of cloth. I really ought to get around to writing a proper review sometime, but the part that’s relevant here touched on a 1629 law in Amsterdam commanding all poor girls unable to do lacework to get “taught to ply a needle to earn their keep.” On the flip side, a little over a century later, the municipal government of Toulouse forbade lacemaking because so many poor local women making lace instead of taking employment as domestic servants.

For an excellent deep dive into one of the largest textile industries in pre-colonial Africa, check out this article about the Sokoto empire ca. 1808-1903 by

isaac Samuel

. But the point I am trying to make here is that needlework was big business, and that training talented slave girls in the making of high-end cloth was a useful economic goal.

The sheer number of women trained in the Old Palace makes it pretty clear that breeding royal mothers cannot possibly have been the only goal of the harem. That said, motherhood was certainly the fastest route to a secure future in the competitive world of Ottoman royal politics. And that’s the route Roxelana went.

Roxelana Secured the Sultan’s Affections

Although she certainly was not ugly, Roxelana was notable not for her beauty but rather for her quick wit, humor, and flair. Her birth name is lost to time, along with the exact story of how she ended up in the royal harem as a teenager, but there she was renamed. This renaming itself was significant — in the Ottoman system, new names marked transformations in identity and status, and the choice of Hurrem, a Persian word meaning “joyful” or “laughing,” certainly makes it seem as though it was Roxelana's personality that made an impression.

It’s not entirely clear how or why Suleiyman fell so thoroughly in love with her. Ottoman women around this time tended to be kept out of the public view, and there seems to have been a bit of a cultural taboo against public writings about the royal harem. Most of what we know comes from foreign diplomats, who obviously weren’t personally intimate with the harem.

We do know that when Roxelana gave birth to her first son, Mehmed, her legal status shifted dramatically. Islamic law recognized and protected concubine mothers in ways that ordinary slaves were not — they could not be sold or given away, and would automatically be freed upon their master’s death. Royal mothers in particular were expected to stop having sex with the sultan, and enter a different stage of relationship with him: that of celibate co-parent. This ensured that the prince would have a staunch mentor and ally; it also allowed for a diverse selection of princes.

To the public, tampering with that formula, which had produced a stellar succession of strong monarchs, must have seemed dangerous.

Suleyman bucked tradition hard when he chose to continue his sexual relationship with Roxelana, which is somewhat surprising because she was not the first concubine he had given a son to — it’s not like he was ‘monogamous by nature’ or incapable of moving on from a lover. But Suleyman and Roxelana went on to have three more boys: Selim, Abdullah, and Bayezid. All were presumably planned, or at least welcome, since Islamic law allowed for certain forms of birth control and the Old Palace had ways of dealing with unwanted pregnancies. This proliferation of sons would later create its own political complications, but at the time it solidified Roxelana’s position as the clear, by-far-and-away, favorite.

The dynamics of royal favor were always precarious, and even established concubines faced threats from newcomers. After tragedy struck and several of Suleyman’s children died, he was given a beautiful new slave girl. I can’t think of any other way to describe Roxelana's response than to say she pitched a hysterical fit worthy of a spoiled diva. According to an ambassador's account, when two beautiful Russian maidens were gifted to the palace — one for the sultan’s mother and one for him — Roxelana became extremely upset and “flung herself to the ground weeping.” The reaction was so dramatic that both Suleyman and his mother backed down, sending the girls away to marry governors instead because Roxelana “would have perished from sorrow” if the maidens had remained in the palace.

What’s wild to me is that this not only worked on Suleyman, but that his mother — the dominant female in the harem hierarchy — backed down and got rid of the gifted maidens. Peirce describes these histrionics as “a clever ploy to shield her emerging status as favorite” but I don’t entirely understand how they could possibly have worked instead of backfiring.

At this particular stage in Roxelana’s career, she was not really politically ascendant. She hadn’t quite mastered the written language yet. Heck, Suleyman didn’t even trust her to manage her own budget properly. Instead, he had a trusted female — and they had to have been friends, check out this postscript from one of their letters2 — watching out for Roxelana.

Gulfem apparently knew the sultan well enough to speak openly and candidly, and it seems he had extracted from her a promise to keep an eye on his favorite because he had concerns about Roxelana’s ability to manage her growing household's finances.

Whatever her relationship with the sultan, Gulfem knew him well enough to speak openly and candidly in her postscript to Roxelana’s letter. It seems he had extracted from her a promise to keep an eye on his favorite. He apparently had some concern about Roxelana’s ability to manage the finances of her growing household.

This kind of financial oversight was probably typical of the Ottoman system’s careful management of royal households, but it also shows how Roxelana was still very much a work in progress as a political figure at this time. Eventually, of course, Roxelana’s skills grew. She became adept at embroidery and sewing, taking pride in her accomplishments and later making gifts of her work to the king of Poland. These weren’t just hobbies — as I mentioned earlier, needlework was serious business, and her ability to create diplomatic gifts showed she was mastering both the practical and symbolic aspects of her role.

Rivalries

The slave girls Roxelana’s hysterics saw banished from the palace are hardly the only rivals that Roxelana faced off against, although they may have been the only rivals she got rid of directly. Although modern historians tend to blame Roxelana for Vizier Ibrahim’s fall from grace, I found Peirce’s arguments that this is ahistorical and unlikely pretty compelling.

The standard story goes that Roxelana took control after Hafsa's death in 1534 and used her powers to turn Suleyman against anyone who might oppose her. Having banished Mahidevran (mother to Suleyman’s oldest son, who was popular with the Janisarries) to the provinces, she next convinced the ‘impressionable sultan’ that Ibrahim was a danger to his reign.

The problem with this judgment is that there is no contemporary evidence of Roxelana’s guilt. Venetians, the keenest and most vocal observers of the two favorites, had nothing to say on the matter of Roxelana’s involvement. Their ambassadors, fascinated with Ibrahim, paid close attention to the ups and downs of the grand vizier’s career. At the same time, like Bassano, they made a point of publicizing news of the sultan’s new wife, so one might well expect to hear about any role she played in his downfall. Bassano had nothing to say on the subject beyond repeating the story that it was Ibrahim who originally presented Roxelana to Suleyman. Ottoman pundits and historians were likewise silent on the matter, although they analyzed at length the reasons for Ibrahim’s fall from favor. Even the late sixteenth-century bureaucrat and historian Mustafa `Ali, who did not hesitate to accuse the queen of malevolent scheming in her later career, made no mention of a connection between Roxelana and the grand vizier’s execution.

She concludes that the public at the time did not actually hold Roxelana guilty for Ibrahim’s death. Ibrahim’s fall may have had more to do with his rapid rise than with Roxelana's supposed scheming. Unlike Suleyman’s other viziers, who had worked their way up through the ranks and earned their status, Ibrahim was simply given his position. This decision so alienated Ahmed Pasha, who believed himself next in line for the office, that he used his consolation prize of the Cairo governorship to stage a rebellion.

Roxelana was also accused of spurring Suleyman on to the Iranian campaign of 1548, one of his few flawed military endeavors. Her detractors alleged that she saw it as an opportunity for her sons to advance themselves militarily. But it's actually more likely that Roxelana opposed the war against the Persians, since it meant Suleyman would be gone for almost two years. We have a lot of evidence that Roxelana hated it when he was away on campaign. Not only did she seem to have genuinely missed him, but she also lost out on the protection his presence offered.

The part I found most convincing was the way Peirce used a nineteenth-century compilation of French diplomatic correspondence to exemplify how Roxelana's reputation as a manipulative schemer evolved. The compiler asserted that the campaign resulted from intrigues by “the sultana, absolute mistress of Suleyman,” who wanted him away from the capital to enhance her son Selim's reputation. But the actual correspondence suggests the opposite. For Roxelana’s part, she feared “the many accidents” that could occur during such a long absence, and tried with all her might to keep Suleyman from going. The correspondence also indicates that the sultan “loved her so ardently he was loath to part from her.”

It was apparently a common literary device to never blame the sultan himself for bad outcomes, but rather to find scapegoats. Suleyman’s reputation as a reed bending in the wind to whatever strong will pushed at him does not seem deserved — at least if one believes Peirce, and I have no particular reason not to.

In addition, the queen may well have shared the political objections voiced by Suleyman’s viziers. Although opposed to the eastern venture, reported the Venetian ambassador Alvise Renier, they were unable to dissuade the sultan. “This is one of his principal traits,” noted Renier of Suleyman’s determination to hold to his decisions. The grand vizier Rustem would afterward win esteem in the sultan’s eyes for having predicted the dubious results of the expensive expedition.

It’s pretty difficult to square a sultan “determined to hold his decisions” with one so weak that he was led by the nose by a beautiful woman and a childhood friend. It’s not impossible—there have certainly been a fair number of petulant brat rulers in history—but in Suleyman’s case in particular, I am disinclined to believe that such a long and effective rule was the product of a weak ruler. The taboo against criticizing the ruler directly makes more sense to me.

Rebellions

Nicolò Machiavelli noted that one reason the Ottoman Empire would be difficult to conquer was that the ministers, slaves, and dependents of the sultan could not be corrupted. This was true in the sense that they couldn’t be bought off by foreign powers — until the 18th century, their status depended on the Ottoman system of turning captured slaves to bureaucratic and military service. But incorruptible is not the same thing as harmless or perfectly obedient.

In 1525, for instance, Janissaries in Istanbul rose up in protest against Suleyman's prolonged absence after he took a long winter sojourn in Thrace to hunt. The rebels pillaged “the customs house, the Jewish quarter where it was located, and the palaces of two viziers and the head treasurer.” And this was far from the only time the Janissaries caused trouble.

During interregnum periods, they were given leave to just flagrantly loot the populace. Then when the new sultan took power, he paid them a big bonus. This institutionalized chaos served a purpose: it created pressure for quick resolution of succession disputes while also giving the Janissaries a financial incentive to support whoever could restore order fastest. It’s brutal, but for awhile at least seems to have been an effective way of ensuring political stability. It came at the cost of civilian suffering, but I’d rather put up with a few weeks of looting than something like the War of the Roses.

The Mature Years

Two months after Suleyman’s mother died, he decided to marry Roxelana. This was an even bigger departure from Ottoman norms in some ways than him having multiple sons by her — not because no sultan had married before, but because back when they were still marrying foreign princesses, they never had children with their wives. The only possible exception was Osman, the founder of the dynastic line.

Suleyman seems to have had his reasons, though… and they weren’t necessarily sheer sentimentality. There’s an interpretation that he married Roxelana because his mother was no longer around to stop him. But I tend to think that powerful men stay powerful when they have at least a passing acquaintance with practical considerations, and there were certainly benefits to marrying Roxelana despite the disruption to tradition.

With his mother gone, Ibrahim (still Suleyman’s confidant and vizier at this time) on the frontier, and his only adult son assigned to monitor all Anatolia, Suleyman needed a trusted intimate in the capital — particularly because the Iranian campaign was such a lengthy affair. The only person who could act as the sultan's eyes and ears was Roxelana, by this point a “seasoned denizen of imperial Istanbul.” He ensured that Roxelana’s (male) steward was also given high status, and kept the seasoned woman that would normally have left to help his sons in the provincial government at home to help with his government — the way his mother had probably done until she died.

Another reason to think that this wasn’t a purely sentimental decision was that they were basically done having kids at this point. Suleyman was approaching forty, a number “replete with religious, mythical, and historical significance for the Ottomans. For men, it was universally thought to be the threshold of full maturity.” Roxelana by contrast was in her late twenties, a perfectly reasonable age for bearing children. I was pregnant with both of mine in my thirties, and I know women who had their first during their early thirties. But apparently Ottoman culture felt it was inappropriate for grandpas to have babies, so despite being in her late twenties, Roxelana also entered the “post-sexual” stage of her life. I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you think they stopped having sex; the Ottomans were comfortable with a certain amount of ‘family planning interventions’ to keep new children from causing hardship to a family. But only in this phase of a royal mother’s life — when in the normal course of things, she would had moved to the provinces with her son — was she considered fully mature, and therefore eligible to endow a prominent foundation.

Public Works Projects

Ottoman royals — like leaders the world over — undertook lots of public works and major infrastructure projects. They also spent a fair amount of energy converting historic infrastructure into the Ottoman style. The Umayyad mosque of Damascus, built atop what started as an ancient Aramaic temple dedicated to the god Hadad, then became a Roman temple to Jupiter, and was was later converted a cathedral to St. John, is just the first example. The “premier mosque of the Ottomans,” the Hagia Sophia, was originally a Byzantine cathedral until Mehmed converted it.

Mehmed was also the sultan responsible for the construction of the new (read: men’s) palace in Istanbul, and it is much more interesting to me than any of the religious buildings.

The architecture of Mehmed’s new palace broadcast the notion that the monarch was an exalted figure, access to whom must be carefully restricted. One moved inward toward power, the Ottomans believed, unlike contemporary metaphor in which movement is upward toward greater authority. The spatial organization of the palace was linear: three courtyards aligned in order of increasing difficulty of access.

She’s right that in the modern day, from America to Dubai, our buildings tend to place the powerful at the top of skyscrapers, not inside multi-layer sanctums consisting of courtyards and single-story disconnected structures. Buckingham Palace and the White House don’t, so far as I know, do this sort of nesting of access or separation of structures. I’m used to access levels being more about the side of the building — you hear more about “the family wing.” The closest analog I can think of is from when I was studying antebellum architecture, where the family rooms would be farther back in the house. Even then, though, the layout tended to be a sort of folded in on itself mirror, where there’d be a formal parlor to the left of the entrance, and a family parlor to the right.

But relatively little building effort went toward palaces at this point in time. The sultans didn’t abandon the New Palace for the ornate Dolmabahçe Palace until the mid 19th century. Instead, they focused on religious buildings, similar to how European leaders focused a lot of their efforts on beautiful cathedrals.

A lot of these religious buildings were sponsored by leading women. Roxelana and her fellows weren’t really public figures; the Ottomans kept women separate in meaningful ways beyond just the harem. Instead of public coronations, or favoring knights in the lists, they took point on handling public works projects. There was a profound obligation to give away wealth through good works and charity. Though this all happened via agents these women met with privately, the populace knew who their sponsors were, and it was mostly through these works that concubine mothers were known.

A big reason for this dates back to Mehmed the Conqueror expropriating religious properties to finance his expansionist military program; his successor Bayezid began giving concubine mothers the financial resources to help build the religious establishment back up, not just re-raising their status but also providing jobs for them. But Roxelana was the first royal mother to build in the imperial capital.

As with the wedding, it’s not clear to me how much of this breaking with tradition was sentimental vs. practical. At the time Roxelana was building her foundation, Istanbul was still recovering from “the severe population decline experienced during the last years of the Byzantine regime.”

What I find most interesting, though, was the care with which she selected the doctors for her hospital — possibly because she and Suleyman had a disabled child, and she was familiar with what bad doctors could look like. She required that the two doctors hired for her hospital not only have a strong medical background but also be “stouthearted, of noble and generous disposition, good-natured, and untroubled” with an “exemplary bedside manner.”

The doctors should not utter even the smallest of brutal or hateful words, for, as the charter noted, “one harsh word can weigh more heavily on a sick person than the worst of maladies.” Comforting speech was not difficult to come by, for there were many words that were “purer than the river of paradise and sweeter than its springs” to the sick.

Roxelana and the other concubine mothers weren’t just re—goddamnit, I hate that AI has polluted this perfectly normal sentence structure. Look, it’s neat that Roxelana got to do something beyond allocate money. She was deeply involved — at a distance, but involved — in the design of the hospital and the staffing of it. Royal women created deeds and charters that dictated the minutiae of hiring and firing, of how many people were meant to be fed, of everyday interactions between staff and served. These foundations were a lot more detailed than charitable giving to the church or funding a building. It doesn’t seem to have been quite like actually running a modern-day nonprofit, but it certainly seems closer to working with lawyers to set one up and choose the board than just sending over some money.

The Legacy of Rome

It wasn’t just Istanbul that Roxelana helped out with public works projects. The most interesting examples, for me, were the ones that (deliberately?) echoed earlier Christian women.

One example was Eirene, who was responsible for the the construction of the Monastery of Christ Pantokrator in Constantinople.

Born Piroska, daughter of the Catholic king of Hungary, Eirene converted to the Orthodox Church and gained her new name when she married. After giving the emperor eight children, she was impelled by her piety, according to hagiographic legend, to urge her husband to help her make this pious endowment an exceptional one.

Roxelana, born a Polish farmer’s daughter under a different name, converted to Islam, gave the sultan a bunch of kids, then urged her husband to fund an exceptional endowment in Istanbul. I definitely see the parallels there.

Another famous Christian woman whose history Roxelana leaned on was Constantine’s mother Helena — one of my favorite historical figures. Helena was “allegedly an innkeeper” when she became the concubine of Constantius I — that Constantine’s father. She later converted to Christianity, traveled to Jerusalem, and ‘uncovered’ a bunch of sacred Christian sites and relics. She was later sainted, and her efforts led to “the revival of Jerusalem as an important locus of Christian pilgrimage.” Specifically, she built a hostel for pilgrims near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Roxelana later revived and expanded it.

The subtext of Roxelana’s foundation was that it acknowledged the work of a pious Christian queen of the past but signaled that the privilege of religious patronage now belonged to a Muslim queen. Patronage, in other words, was a form of colonization, first by one empire, then by the next. The spirit of the hilltop was preserved, but now it purveyed a specifically Ottoman charity.

It seems like the Ottomans did a lot of this sort of riffing off (and rebranding of) the legacy of the Romans — not that they were the only ones to do so around this time. The Holy Roman Empire under Charles loomed large, and where it re-built the legacy of Rome in the West, Suleyman, following in the footsteps of his father Selim, was hard at work reviving it in the East.

The Hippodrome, originally built by the Roman emperor Septimus Severus as a circus arena, was later used by the Byzantines for “chariot races, the public proclamation of new emperors, and the ‘triumphs’ that celebrated their military victories.” Suleyman revived the tradition of using it for public entertainment: specifically, for his eldest son’s circumcision festivities.

When the sultans stopped marrying foreign princesses in huge festival weddings (long after they stopped reproducing with them, in the beginning of the 15th century), they switched to publicly celebrating their children’s adulthood rituals. For sons, this was circumcision; for daughters, marriage. So these circumcision festivities would have been a big deal.

There were other prominent examples of Suleyman and Roxelana making callbacks to Roman might, though. The diadem that shows up in most paintings of Suleyman that I’ve seen was explicitly meant to convey “the message that only the combined forces represented by the three tiers of the pope’s crown and the single one of Charles’s could match Suleyman’s prestige and power.” It was also hugely expensive, and the need to pull back on that sort of ostentation might have been part of why the Vizier Ibrahim (who was famously ostentatious) was ousted toward the middle of Suleyman’s reign.

Diplomacy

The tension between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire was a pretty big deal, and one of Roxelana’s jobs was to help deal diplomatically with that situation. She wasn’t the first female diplomat, but she was the first wife to take on that role, as opposed to a sultan’s mother or aunt. Around this time period, there were a fair number of powerful women in European courts, and having Roxelana to communicate with them via the backchannels was undoubtedly useful.

I have written at length on the diplomatic role of princesses, so I won’t hammer that point too hard, but there are two examples that I think show the diplomatic value of royal women particularly well.

The first is Poland, which was sort of a mess. Roxelana supported Queen Bona Sforza (as in the rulers of Milan Sforzas — she was a Duchess in her own right, as well) when it came to marrying off her stepson. Bona was a political force, and pushed Sigismund Augustus into marrying Elizabeth of Austria, the eldest of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I’s 15 children. After Elizabeth died, Sigismund defied his mother and married a mistress, then she died, and after a few more relationships with unpopular mistresses, married Elizabeth’s sister Catherine of Austria. There was a miscarriage, Sigismund tried to get the Pope to grant him a divorce, and when that failed, Catherine went back to Austria and Sigismund died childless.

One wonders how things might have gone for him if he’d listened to his mother, but Roxelana and her daughter Mihrumah kept up warm correspondence with Poland, exchanging gifts and kind words that were simply more effusive than anything Suleyman or Rustem, the grand vizier, could have said while keeping with diplomatic protocols.

But in general, there were a lot of powerful women in the sixteenth century —from Bona Sforza to Elizabeth I of England to Catherine de Medici and more. Roxelana, her daughter, and her sons and grandsons’ favorite concubines did a lot of important work in growing relationships with them.

Elizabeth apparently solicited Safiye’s support for an alliance between England and the sultanate, for Safiye wrote, “Be of good heart in this respect. I constantly admonish my son, the Padishah (Mehmed III, Roxelana’s great-grandson), to act according to the treaty.… God-willing may you not suffer grief in this regard.”

The second example of royal women’s diplomatic value is more important: Roxelana kept the peace between her sons and husband. Though many suspect Roxelana of plotting the execution of Suleyman’s oldest son Mustafa — beloved of the Jannisarries — Suleyman’s execution of his son Bayezid and four grandsons after a rebellion in 1561 kind of makes me doubt it was all her poisonous whispers. Although the Ottomans didn’t experience anything as bad as the American Civil War, or the British War of the Roses, after she died in 1558 things went south with Bayezid too.

The impression I got was that Roxelana did a lot to mend fences between the men in the family, trying to keep a lid on the inevitable tension that comes from a system where there’s no clear heir and getting the jump on your father can make sure you aren’t offed in order to help out the ‘favorite.’ I genuinely wonder how different things would have been if Suleyman had died first, the way they feared would happen. Would she have been able to broker a peace between the brothers, if Bayezid and Suleyman weren’t so afraid of betrayal?

I don’t know. But I like to think so.

Conclusion

Ironically, I first picked it up because I read a tagline or review or something along the lines of “find out how one of history’s most powerful seductresses got and kept her man.” Alas, now I can’t find where I read that, but this book offers remarkably little to explain how exactly Roxelana managed to so compel Suleyman.

Instead, it’s a detailed account of one of the most pivotal moments in the history of one of history’s most powerful empires, told from the perspective of someone who ‘could have been me.’ She felt relatable not just because my father’s family is from the same region, but because she loved her husband and children more than anything. Although her efforts in adapting to a life of poverty to a life of wealth were much more extreme than mine, I grew up in a blue collar town and ended up moving — through merit and through marriage — into engineering circles that require a lot more managerial skills than I was originally ‘trained’ for.

I found Roxelana especially relatable because she was so different from powerful queens like Elizabeth I of England or Russia’s Catherine the Great or Isabella the She-Wolf of France. Roxelana was not born to power, she demonstrated her merit through the royal harem’s elite educational system. She wasn’t jumping into a masculine role, either; her power was first and always downstream of her sultan. But she was not only exceptionally influential compared to most ‘normal’ European queens, she changed things for local women great and small in a meaningful and long-lasting way.

Most books involving the rehabilitation of historical women from a feminist perspective feel a bit forced and aggressive. This one just felt like a gentle reminder that some narratives benefit from a different perspective.

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