November 3, 2010 • 20 mins
Roxelana has one of the strangest rags-to-riches stories in history. As a slave who entered Suleyman's harem and rose through the ranks to become the wife of the Sultan, Roxelana became a symbol of the Ottoman empire. Tune in to learn more about Roxelana.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kenny Lamer and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And people have
long been fascinated by the sultans of the Ottoman Empire,
(00:21):
by this enormous power they wielded across continents and across
the centuries, by their extravagant wealth and elaborate building projects,
and by their fratricide. They're pretty well known for that
this is one of those one of which one of
those things does not fit. And of course by their
dramatic ascendency and their equally dramatic decline. But come on,
(00:44):
Sultans of the Ottoman Empire are probably best known for
their harems. Exactly. We put it in the title. We
thought that you might listen to it because it had harem,
and the title were so true. We know what you like. Um. So,
people have this very romantic idea about what a harem is.
It's mazes of concubines and slaves, and they're all guarded
(01:06):
by eunuchs, so many women, so many kids. It seems
just like the most mysterious, most Eastern Ottoman thing you
can imagine finnishized part. Yes, but if you romanticize Harem
life too much, it's easy to forget that Harems were
simply living quarters, schools, hospitals. They were filled not just
(01:27):
with the sultan's concubines, but with his female relatives, his children,
and they're all presided over by his own mother. It's
a little city, and it's the sultan's entire domestic sphere.
It's not just batting with people and sexy gus, it's
not just sexy room dime. It's the Sultan's house. That's
(01:48):
my new favorite phrase for There could be hundreds or
thousands of people in the harem, and some of them, unsurprisingly,
had a lot of influence in affairs of state. The
chief black or white eunuch fortunates who slept with the sultan,
the valid Sultan, his mother, who was often just as
important as the Grand Vizier and considerably more trustworthy. But
in the mid sixteenth century, the influence of the harem grew.
(02:12):
A series of Harem women, concubine sisters, aunts and mothers
exerted a tremendous amount of influence on a series of sultan's,
leading some historians to call this one fifty year stretch
the reign of women. Yeah, and this is a very
popular listener suggestion, along with harems and along with a
lot of these specific women who reigned quote during this period.
(02:35):
But today we're going to talk about the woman who
said to have started this whole era. She was a
captured slave best known as rock Selana. Rock Salana is
the ultimate rags to riches story and her Polish countrymen
loved her for it. The Ottomans hated her for it.
That here are her beginnings, complete with their very obscure origin.
(02:56):
So the girl was possibly named Alexandra or Anasta Zielisovska
who was born around fifteen oh four near Le Wolf
in the western Ukraine, which is pulling at the time.
She was possibly the daughter of an Orthodox priest and
an unknown woman. And because the Tartars were pretty much
constantly rating Poland at this time, this little girl with
(03:17):
her reddish blonde hair was snatched up and sold into slavery. Yeah,
and somehow she made it all the way to Constantinople,
where she ended up in the harem of the Sultan
or possibly the soon to be Sultan Suleiman. She was
about fifteen years old, and we should talk a little
bit about Suleiman. He he's magnificent. He is oh that's
(03:40):
his his nickname, Suleiman the Magnificent. He came to power
in fifteen twenty and he's known for greatly expanding the
Ottoman Empire. He nearly captured Vienna, So that gives you
a pretty good idea of how far this guy's power stretched.
And he's an interesting guy too. He's intelligent, he's kind,
(04:00):
he seems very gentle, yet he also has a brutal
reputation as well. He loved poetry. His pen name was
Moohie b Uh. He put through a lot of legal reforms.
He tried to simplify the law. He tried to end
discrimination against Christian subjects and lightened up sentences on criminals.
But he also had plenty of prisoners executed and killed,
(04:23):
lots of family members, lots even for assultan standards which
are very be the same as your Yeah, and he
started the tradition of saying nothing when foreign ambassadors presented themselves, which,
oh boy, I don't think I could be a foreign ambassador.
That would be hard to deal with it. I can
see Jack Donneghye the modern Sultan. So um, here's what
(04:46):
the Venetian envoy says of Suliman. He's quote by nature, melancholy,
much addicted to women, liberal, proud, hasty, and yet sometimes
very gentle. So going into this podcast with that description
of the man, if you're going to give him a present,
what might you bring him? Perhaps are sweet redheaded rock Salona,
(05:08):
She might make a lovely gift. And she did, indeed,
And even though she would have entered the harem and
its lowest ranks, there was a really strict hierarchy than
the harem, if you want to talk a little more
about that. As we mentioned earlier, the sultan's mother would
be the reigning woman of the savoy, and then she'd
be followed by the mother of his eldest son, and
(05:30):
she would be followed by his other sexual partners, followed
by women who he may later choose a and then
just other ladies too. So she would have come into
this whole scheme the very bottom, but she may have
become a favorite of the Sultan's mother for her intelligence
and her humor. So she managed to rise in the
(05:51):
ranks a little bit more quickly than some and she
would have lived in a dorm of sorts and learned Persian, Arabic, Turkish, poetry, calligraphy, selling, dancing, singing, music, storytelling.
It's not again just sitting around and waiting to enjoy
the Sultan's favor. They were doing things with their free time,
(06:12):
and they were chosen a lot of times for their
intelligence and for their charm, your ability to make conversation
and you know, be amusing exactly. And actually, according to
Venetian reports, Roxalona isn't even particularly beautiful. She's elegant, but
she's smart, and she's fun and she's nice to talk to.
She must also have caught the Sultan's eye pretty quickly,
(06:35):
because by one she had her first son by him, Mahmed,
And she also had a new name of her own,
her Um or joyful one, which she took upon converting
to Islam. And it sounds like a happy family. She
has this name meaning joyful one, she has her son
by the sultan um maybe sort of distancing herself from
(06:56):
that obviously traumatic capture and I'm in slavery. It's not
really the most happy family. So we're going to digress
for a minute and talk about Ottoman reticide, which we
mentioned at the beginning. It's an unfortunate consequence of Harem life,
and it's the reverse problem of a lot of the
(07:16):
European dynasties where they don't have an air there too.
Inbred Um. Here we have far too many, too many sons,
and so when a lot of sultan's came to power,
the first thing they did was have all of their
half brothers and nephews strangled. You didn't want to spill
the royal blood, so you'd have them strangled by like
a silk cord or something un elegant. Elegant, but you're
(07:40):
still being strangled, which is probably not a very elegant death. Uh.
They did this because they didn't want competing claims to
the throne. We know what happens when you have a
lot of men who are all trying to claim their steak,
you end up with war. This was a way to
try to avoid that. Hair and women weren't even allowed
to have two sons by the sultan, so the idea
(08:03):
was one concubine mother, one son, and then you better
hope you had some girls. So consequently, Harrah mothers were
very invested in their sons in case in point, Mahmed
is not Soliman's oldest son, a kid named Mustafa is
and Sarah and I are holding back every urge to
go all lion king and saying stuff for the rest
of this podcast. That will be the only time. That's
(08:25):
the only time. And I got to do it, Sorry,
Sarah and his mother, the former favorite Ghoula Bahar, is
not pleased with this upstart Rock Salana, so she attacks
Rock Salonna. She scratches her face and you know, attempts
to scar and disfigure her, and she calls her sold meat.
And so in Suliman summons Rock Salona. She refuses him,
which is a very bold thing to do. Um. She
(08:48):
could have been cast aside or punished for it. But
she says that she's too disfigured to appear before him.
And she she pulls off that quote again, she's sold
sold me. She can't come. Um. He makes her come anyway,
and then he asks Gulabahar if it's true that she
attacked rock Selanna, and she says, yes, it is true,
(09:09):
and she deserved it. It backfires big time on Gulabahar
because it's not long before Mustafa is sent off to
act as a governor in a far away province, and
following the tradition of accompanying your son, Ghulabahar is packing
her bags to follow him. So she's not in the
capital anymore, she's not with the Sultan. She's away from
(09:32):
where everything is going down, and rock Salana becomes the
apple of the Sultan's i. They have a daughter together, Marima,
who he adores, and three more sons, Salim, Beyazite and
Jay Hunger who has a hunchback. So this big family
is a big deal. He's letting her break that one mother,
one son rule, which people don't like. That's a little
(09:53):
scary as far as the power balance goes, definitely, people
really don't like it. She's getting way too much power,
it seems, and has way too big of a hold
over the Sultan. But then things get even more outrageous
because Suleiman becomes nearly monogamas, which is oranges say it's
(10:14):
he starts marrying off his slaves, marrying off his concubines,
which is something you could I didn't always realize that
that was the case. That the hare in life. If
you didn't have a son by the sultan, you could
make a pretty good marriage deal. After around fifteen thirty,
Suleman marries Rock Salona, and Sir George Young of England
(10:34):
reported that there was a grand celebration, houses strong with garlands,
There were tournaments, there were feasts, giraffes on parade. No
Ottoman sultan had been married for more than two centuries.
The rest preferred to keep slaves and concubines. So you
can imagine how big of an affair this was. Yeah,
you have to imagine too. It was probably a begrudging
(10:55):
celebration on a f fast part, but it's clear how
much sle him On is in love with his wife.
In one poem, he describes Roxelanna as my sheer, delight,
my revelry, my feast, my torch, my sunshine, my son
in heaven, my orange, my pomegranate, the flaming candle that
lights up my pavilion. When's the last time you got
(11:17):
compared to a citrus fruit or a pomegranate? And I
mean that's probably the best part. But Roxelana wasn't just
a lovely pomegranate so much more. She became his most
trusted adviser, and after his mother died in four the
top woman in the Empire, and she works really hard
to master her Turkish so that she can communicate with
(11:39):
the Sultan while he's away on his campaign. Now, she
she works to make herself extremely valuable and stay in
the loop. They write these love letters to each other
while he's away, and they're filled with lots of tender sentiments,
but also a lot of news about what's going on.
She's clearly his eyes in the capital. She keeps spies
too in form her about what's going on, about any
(12:01):
plots against the Sultan, and to just keep her in
the loop about foreign affairs as well. Yeah, so she
can be the one who delivers the news there's this
coup against you. And she carefully guards who her husband
gets close to, because of course those are possible rivals.
She exposes the forgery of the Sultan's best friend and
Grand Vizier Ibraheim, and the Sultan has him executed, and
(12:23):
she also acts as a chief diplomatical liaison to Europe.
She's believed to be at least partly responsible for the
Empire's relations with Poland, which for a time turned friendly.
There were truces in fifteen twenty five and fifteen twenty
eight and eternal peace treaties in fifteen thirty three, and
then two of them if they're so eternal, Yeah, you
(12:44):
probably don't. She corresponded with the Polish kings, and it's
possible that she had some interest in slowing the slave
trade in her country, although we can't say. We can't
say that for sure. Yeah, according to Muslim World, between
the fifteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century,
two point five million Ukrainians were kidnapped and sold into
slavery um and the Tartars apparently treated their captives very poorly,
(13:08):
which I feel like that's something we should emphasize to
this slave trade in the Ottoman Empire is huge, so
it's not a it's not a nice side of things. Well,
and most of them are not so little girls snatched
up and sold into the Harem stories I mean sound
that way just for the story's sake, but that's not
quite how it worked. So yeah, she clearly would have
(13:29):
had an interest in at least stopping that in her
own homeland, and she even relocates when fire destroys the
Harem and the old palace, Roxalana moves into the Sultan's
house to copy right behind the throne room. And when
he wants to build her a new palace, she returned
to the old way. Yeah, you know, she deflects him.
Let's I'll just stay here. Why don't we build a
(13:51):
mosque instead, So she is literally at the center of power.
Now she's played her cards well. Unsurprisingly, a lot of
Ottomans are suspicious and jealous of Roxalana in this enormous
control she exerts over the Sultan, and especially so when
her sons began to come of age and they're sent
(14:12):
off to governed provinces as they traditionally do, and she
doesn't go with one of them. So normally, as we
mentioned earlier with Mustafa, yeah, mothers would accompany their sons
and they would only return to the capital if their
son became sultan, and they were returning in the capacity
of mother of the sultan. And this was just sort
(14:35):
of an old and convenient way to separate power between women.
So you have the sultan's sexual favorite back in the capital,
and then you had the mother of his heir and
she's off somewhere else. But as the Sultan's wife, Roxalana
stays living with Suleman and their son Jehungir and took copy.
And she wants to stay close to the Sultan for
(14:57):
a reason, very important reason. Salona knew that whatever her
place was with Suliman, if his eldest son was allowed
to succeed, her sons would be killed. And Mustafa wasn't
only just the eldest son. He was he was a
proper sultan. He was handsome, he was popular with the army,
he was popular with the people. You know, it seemed
(15:18):
like something that would stick. He seems like a sure
bet he did. It seemed like he would definitely be sultan,
making her son's tough luck for them. So she sticks
by Suleiman in the capital, and she makes sure that
he hears about every single plot in every possible coup.
And she also has an ally in the Grand Vizier,
(15:38):
who happens to conveniently be her daughter's husband, which was
also a breach of tradition. The Sultan wasn't supposed to
have a grand vizier who was related to him. It's
obviously a conflict of interest. Um So, eventually, with these
two sort of planning ideas, and of course their daughter
and other allies, eventually the Sultan starts to worry about
(16:00):
his son, Mustafa's intentions. Hint, hint, what is this guy
up to out in the provinces, And eventually he has
his own son assassinated, so Mustafa is out of the way.
People were very, very unhappy about this assassination. They accused
rock Salanna of being a witch and saying she charmed
the Sultan with potions. But Salim is the air now,
(16:23):
so she's pretty happy. Rock Salonna died in fifteen fifty eight,
and Suleiman buried her in his new mosque and ordered
another built in her name, plus a school and a hospital,
and his final years were appropriately dramatic. Sons, Slim and
Beyazite fought over succession. The Sultan had Beazite killed for
(16:44):
his intrigues with the Shaw of Persia. Should have learned
from his elder half brother. He should have, but he didn't.
His daughter Mirima replaced her mother as Suliman's most trusted adviser,
a position she kept when her brother Selim became sultan.
He's sometimes known as Salim the Sought because of his
fondness for drinks. Well, and that's another important note to make.
(17:05):
Sultan's were so concerned about what their sons had going on,
you know, if they were seriously planning a coup or
some sort of plot um that they would try to
give them as much alcohol as possible, as many drugs
as possible, as many women women as possible, and just
sort of turn them into guys who aren't particularly threatening.
(17:26):
Of course, that doesn't always bread the best ruler, and
so we end up with this period in history where
the women of the Harem end up exerting more control
than they normally would have. Marima was instrumental in the
decision to seize Malta, and she was influential through many rains.
Her nephew Murad the Third had her buried with Suleiman,
(17:47):
and she was followed by other powerful hair On women
like saw Norbanus, Sophia kosim Um. But before we leave
rock Salona completely behind, we'd like to talk a little
bit about her reputations the centuries. Yeah, and I found
it kind of strange to research and to talk about
someone who was so clearly, so influential in her immediate
(18:11):
history and after all over Europe and Asia. Um. But
she left behind so little information because after all, she
lived in a Harem. The whole point of a harem
is to keep it private and separate from public life,
and reports of harem life are famously skewed. Ambassadors didn't
always know what they were reporting and sort of would
(18:32):
spin things however they solt fit. So what we do
have is her correspondence with Suleiman's salary records, Suleiman's diaries
and love letters, and rock Salona's letters to Sigismond the second,
and they paint a picture of a couple very much
invested in each other and a capable ruthless consort to
match a capable ruthless ruler, as Sarah put it to
(18:55):
me earlier. Yeah, but a lot of these documents weren't
known until the nineteen or twentieth Counry, and by that
point rox Salona had already gotten herself quite a reputation
as this manipulator, maybe a witch, you never know. UM.
English historian Richard Knolly's called her the greatest empress of
the East, which sounds like a compliment, but he also
(19:15):
portrayed her as this really wicked woman who controlled the
good Sultan entirely. UM. Eastern European histories go a little
more towards the Cinderella route, because after all, this is there, um,
this is their countrywoman. She's a slave who rises to
great power. But I mean, I think that you can
have a little bit of both. I mean, it seems
(19:37):
like she did exert quite amount of good, uh, but
you'd have to be ruthless. She was working within the
Harem structure, which is they based around ruthlessness essentially, and
for her survival, for her family's survival. She was of
course a slave to begin with, and she died the
wife of a sultan, the first sultan's wife in two
(19:58):
hundred years. So we say, well played, Roxelana. And if
you have a different opinion, feel free to email us
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We
also have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed
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(20:23):
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stuff you Missed in History Glass blog on the how
stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kenny Lamer and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And people have
long been fascinated by the sultans of the Ottoman Empire,
(00:21):
by this enormous power they wielded across continents and across
the centuries, by their extravagant wealth and elaborate building projects,
and by their fratricide. They're pretty well known for that
this is one of those one of which one of
those things does not fit. And of course by their
dramatic ascendency and their equally dramatic decline. But come on,
(00:44):
Sultans of the Ottoman Empire are probably best known for
their harems. Exactly. We put it in the title. We
thought that you might listen to it because it had harem,
and the title were so true. We know what you like. Um. So,
people have this very romantic idea about what a harem is.
It's mazes of concubines and slaves, and they're all guarded
(01:06):
by eunuchs, so many women, so many kids. It seems
just like the most mysterious, most Eastern Ottoman thing you
can imagine finnishized part. Yes, but if you romanticize Harem
life too much, it's easy to forget that Harems were
simply living quarters, schools, hospitals. They were filled not just
(01:27):
with the sultan's concubines, but with his female relatives, his children,
and they're all presided over by his own mother. It's
a little city, and it's the sultan's entire domestic sphere.
It's not just batting with people and sexy gus, it's
not just sexy room dime. It's the Sultan's house. That's
(01:48):
my new favorite phrase for There could be hundreds or
thousands of people in the harem, and some of them, unsurprisingly,
had a lot of influence in affairs of state. The
chief black or white eunuch fortunates who slept with the sultan,
the valid Sultan, his mother, who was often just as
important as the Grand Vizier and considerably more trustworthy. But
in the mid sixteenth century, the influence of the harem grew.
(02:12):
A series of Harem women, concubine sisters, aunts and mothers
exerted a tremendous amount of influence on a series of sultan's,
leading some historians to call this one fifty year stretch
the reign of women. Yeah, and this is a very
popular listener suggestion, along with harems and along with a
lot of these specific women who reigned quote during this period.
(02:35):
But today we're going to talk about the woman who
said to have started this whole era. She was a
captured slave best known as rock Selana. Rock Salana is
the ultimate rags to riches story and her Polish countrymen
loved her for it. The Ottomans hated her for it.
That here are her beginnings, complete with their very obscure origin.
(02:56):
So the girl was possibly named Alexandra or Anasta Zielisovska
who was born around fifteen oh four near Le Wolf
in the western Ukraine, which is pulling at the time.
She was possibly the daughter of an Orthodox priest and
an unknown woman. And because the Tartars were pretty much
constantly rating Poland at this time, this little girl with
(03:17):
her reddish blonde hair was snatched up and sold into slavery. Yeah,
and somehow she made it all the way to Constantinople,
where she ended up in the harem of the Sultan
or possibly the soon to be Sultan Suleiman. She was
about fifteen years old, and we should talk a little
bit about Suleiman. He he's magnificent. He is oh that's
(03:40):
his his nickname, Suleiman the Magnificent. He came to power
in fifteen twenty and he's known for greatly expanding the
Ottoman Empire. He nearly captured Vienna, So that gives you
a pretty good idea of how far this guy's power stretched.
And he's an interesting guy too. He's intelligent, he's kind,
(04:00):
he seems very gentle, yet he also has a brutal
reputation as well. He loved poetry. His pen name was
Moohie b Uh. He put through a lot of legal reforms.
He tried to simplify the law. He tried to end
discrimination against Christian subjects and lightened up sentences on criminals.
But he also had plenty of prisoners executed and killed,
(04:23):
lots of family members, lots even for assultan standards which
are very be the same as your Yeah, and he
started the tradition of saying nothing when foreign ambassadors presented themselves, which,
oh boy, I don't think I could be a foreign ambassador.
That would be hard to deal with it. I can
see Jack Donneghye the modern Sultan. So um, here's what
(04:46):
the Venetian envoy says of Suliman. He's quote by nature, melancholy,
much addicted to women, liberal, proud, hasty, and yet sometimes
very gentle. So going into this podcast with that description
of the man, if you're going to give him a present,
what might you bring him? Perhaps are sweet redheaded rock Salona,
(05:08):
She might make a lovely gift. And she did, indeed,
And even though she would have entered the harem and
its lowest ranks, there was a really strict hierarchy than
the harem, if you want to talk a little more
about that. As we mentioned earlier, the sultan's mother would
be the reigning woman of the savoy, and then she'd
be followed by the mother of his eldest son, and
(05:30):
she would be followed by his other sexual partners, followed
by women who he may later choose a and then
just other ladies too. So she would have come into
this whole scheme the very bottom, but she may have
become a favorite of the Sultan's mother for her intelligence
and her humor. So she managed to rise in the
(05:51):
ranks a little bit more quickly than some and she
would have lived in a dorm of sorts and learned Persian, Arabic, Turkish, poetry, calligraphy, selling, dancing, singing, music, storytelling.
It's not again just sitting around and waiting to enjoy
the Sultan's favor. They were doing things with their free time,
(06:12):
and they were chosen a lot of times for their
intelligence and for their charm, your ability to make conversation
and you know, be amusing exactly. And actually, according to
Venetian reports, Roxalona isn't even particularly beautiful. She's elegant, but
she's smart, and she's fun and she's nice to talk to.
She must also have caught the Sultan's eye pretty quickly,
(06:35):
because by one she had her first son by him, Mahmed,
And she also had a new name of her own,
her Um or joyful one, which she took upon converting
to Islam. And it sounds like a happy family. She
has this name meaning joyful one, she has her son
by the sultan um maybe sort of distancing herself from
(06:56):
that obviously traumatic capture and I'm in slavery. It's not
really the most happy family. So we're going to digress
for a minute and talk about Ottoman reticide, which we
mentioned at the beginning. It's an unfortunate consequence of Harem life,
and it's the reverse problem of a lot of the
(07:16):
European dynasties where they don't have an air there too.
Inbred Um. Here we have far too many, too many sons,
and so when a lot of sultan's came to power,
the first thing they did was have all of their
half brothers and nephews strangled. You didn't want to spill
the royal blood, so you'd have them strangled by like
a silk cord or something un elegant. Elegant, but you're
(07:40):
still being strangled, which is probably not a very elegant death. Uh.
They did this because they didn't want competing claims to
the throne. We know what happens when you have a
lot of men who are all trying to claim their steak,
you end up with war. This was a way to
try to avoid that. Hair and women weren't even allowed
to have two sons by the sultan, so the idea
(08:03):
was one concubine mother, one son, and then you better
hope you had some girls. So consequently, Harrah mothers were
very invested in their sons in case in point, Mahmed
is not Soliman's oldest son, a kid named Mustafa is
and Sarah and I are holding back every urge to
go all lion king and saying stuff for the rest
of this podcast. That will be the only time. That's
(08:25):
the only time. And I got to do it, Sorry,
Sarah and his mother, the former favorite Ghoula Bahar, is
not pleased with this upstart Rock Salana, so she attacks
Rock Salonna. She scratches her face and you know, attempts
to scar and disfigure her, and she calls her sold meat.
And so in Suliman summons Rock Salona. She refuses him,
which is a very bold thing to do. Um. She
(08:48):
could have been cast aside or punished for it. But
she says that she's too disfigured to appear before him.
And she she pulls off that quote again, she's sold
sold me. She can't come. Um. He makes her come anyway,
and then he asks Gulabahar if it's true that she
attacked rock Selanna, and she says, yes, it is true,
(09:09):
and she deserved it. It backfires big time on Gulabahar
because it's not long before Mustafa is sent off to
act as a governor in a far away province, and
following the tradition of accompanying your son, Ghulabahar is packing
her bags to follow him. So she's not in the
capital anymore, she's not with the Sultan. She's away from
(09:32):
where everything is going down, and rock Salana becomes the
apple of the Sultan's i. They have a daughter together, Marima,
who he adores, and three more sons, Salim, Beyazite and
Jay Hunger who has a hunchback. So this big family
is a big deal. He's letting her break that one mother,
one son rule, which people don't like. That's a little
(09:53):
scary as far as the power balance goes, definitely, people
really don't like it. She's getting way too much power,
it seems, and has way too big of a hold
over the Sultan. But then things get even more outrageous
because Suleiman becomes nearly monogamas, which is oranges say it's
(10:14):
he starts marrying off his slaves, marrying off his concubines,
which is something you could I didn't always realize that
that was the case. That the hare in life. If
you didn't have a son by the sultan, you could
make a pretty good marriage deal. After around fifteen thirty,
Suleman marries Rock Salona, and Sir George Young of England
(10:34):
reported that there was a grand celebration, houses strong with garlands,
There were tournaments, there were feasts, giraffes on parade. No
Ottoman sultan had been married for more than two centuries.
The rest preferred to keep slaves and concubines. So you
can imagine how big of an affair this was. Yeah,
you have to imagine too. It was probably a begrudging
(10:55):
celebration on a f fast part, but it's clear how
much sle him On is in love with his wife.
In one poem, he describes Roxelanna as my sheer, delight,
my revelry, my feast, my torch, my sunshine, my son
in heaven, my orange, my pomegranate, the flaming candle that
lights up my pavilion. When's the last time you got
(11:17):
compared to a citrus fruit or a pomegranate? And I
mean that's probably the best part. But Roxelana wasn't just
a lovely pomegranate so much more. She became his most
trusted adviser, and after his mother died in four the
top woman in the Empire, and she works really hard
to master her Turkish so that she can communicate with
(11:39):
the Sultan while he's away on his campaign. Now, she
she works to make herself extremely valuable and stay in
the loop. They write these love letters to each other
while he's away, and they're filled with lots of tender sentiments,
but also a lot of news about what's going on.
She's clearly his eyes in the capital. She keeps spies
too in form her about what's going on, about any
(12:01):
plots against the Sultan, and to just keep her in
the loop about foreign affairs as well. Yeah, so she
can be the one who delivers the news there's this
coup against you. And she carefully guards who her husband
gets close to, because of course those are possible rivals.
She exposes the forgery of the Sultan's best friend and
Grand Vizier Ibraheim, and the Sultan has him executed, and
(12:23):
she also acts as a chief diplomatical liaison to Europe.
She's believed to be at least partly responsible for the
Empire's relations with Poland, which for a time turned friendly.
There were truces in fifteen twenty five and fifteen twenty
eight and eternal peace treaties in fifteen thirty three, and
then two of them if they're so eternal, Yeah, you
(12:44):
probably don't. She corresponded with the Polish kings, and it's
possible that she had some interest in slowing the slave
trade in her country, although we can't say. We can't
say that for sure. Yeah, according to Muslim World, between
the fifteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century,
two point five million Ukrainians were kidnapped and sold into
slavery um and the Tartars apparently treated their captives very poorly,
(13:08):
which I feel like that's something we should emphasize to
this slave trade in the Ottoman Empire is huge, so
it's not a it's not a nice side of things. Well,
and most of them are not so little girls snatched
up and sold into the Harem stories I mean sound
that way just for the story's sake, but that's not
quite how it worked. So yeah, she clearly would have
(13:29):
had an interest in at least stopping that in her
own homeland, and she even relocates when fire destroys the
Harem and the old palace, Roxalana moves into the Sultan's
house to copy right behind the throne room. And when
he wants to build her a new palace, she returned
to the old way. Yeah, you know, she deflects him.
Let's I'll just stay here. Why don't we build a
(13:51):
mosque instead, So she is literally at the center of power.
Now she's played her cards well. Unsurprisingly, a lot of
Ottomans are suspicious and jealous of Roxalana in this enormous
control she exerts over the Sultan, and especially so when
her sons began to come of age and they're sent
(14:12):
off to governed provinces as they traditionally do, and she
doesn't go with one of them. So normally, as we
mentioned earlier with Mustafa, yeah, mothers would accompany their sons
and they would only return to the capital if their
son became sultan, and they were returning in the capacity
of mother of the sultan. And this was just sort
(14:35):
of an old and convenient way to separate power between women.
So you have the sultan's sexual favorite back in the capital,
and then you had the mother of his heir and
she's off somewhere else. But as the Sultan's wife, Roxalana
stays living with Suleman and their son Jehungir and took copy.
And she wants to stay close to the Sultan for
(14:57):
a reason, very important reason. Salona knew that whatever her
place was with Suliman, if his eldest son was allowed
to succeed, her sons would be killed. And Mustafa wasn't
only just the eldest son. He was he was a
proper sultan. He was handsome, he was popular with the army,
he was popular with the people. You know, it seemed
(15:18):
like something that would stick. He seems like a sure
bet he did. It seemed like he would definitely be sultan,
making her son's tough luck for them. So she sticks
by Suleiman in the capital, and she makes sure that
he hears about every single plot in every possible coup.
And she also has an ally in the Grand Vizier,
(15:38):
who happens to conveniently be her daughter's husband, which was
also a breach of tradition. The Sultan wasn't supposed to
have a grand vizier who was related to him. It's
obviously a conflict of interest. Um So, eventually, with these
two sort of planning ideas, and of course their daughter
and other allies, eventually the Sultan starts to worry about
(16:00):
his son, Mustafa's intentions. Hint, hint, what is this guy
up to out in the provinces, And eventually he has
his own son assassinated, so Mustafa is out of the way.
People were very, very unhappy about this assassination. They accused
rock Salanna of being a witch and saying she charmed
the Sultan with potions. But Salim is the air now,
(16:23):
so she's pretty happy. Rock Salonna died in fifteen fifty eight,
and Suleiman buried her in his new mosque and ordered
another built in her name, plus a school and a hospital,
and his final years were appropriately dramatic. Sons, Slim and
Beyazite fought over succession. The Sultan had Beazite killed for
(16:44):
his intrigues with the Shaw of Persia. Should have learned
from his elder half brother. He should have, but he didn't.
His daughter Mirima replaced her mother as Suliman's most trusted adviser,
a position she kept when her brother Selim became sultan.
He's sometimes known as Salim the Sought because of his
fondness for drinks. Well, and that's another important note to make.
(17:05):
Sultan's were so concerned about what their sons had going on,
you know, if they were seriously planning a coup or
some sort of plot um that they would try to
give them as much alcohol as possible, as many drugs
as possible, as many women women as possible, and just
sort of turn them into guys who aren't particularly threatening.
(17:26):
Of course, that doesn't always bread the best ruler, and
so we end up with this period in history where
the women of the Harem end up exerting more control
than they normally would have. Marima was instrumental in the
decision to seize Malta, and she was influential through many rains.
Her nephew Murad the Third had her buried with Suleiman,
(17:47):
and she was followed by other powerful hair On women
like saw Norbanus, Sophia kosim Um. But before we leave
rock Salona completely behind, we'd like to talk a little
bit about her reputations the centuries. Yeah, and I found
it kind of strange to research and to talk about
someone who was so clearly, so influential in her immediate
(18:11):
history and after all over Europe and Asia. Um. But
she left behind so little information because after all, she
lived in a Harem. The whole point of a harem
is to keep it private and separate from public life,
and reports of harem life are famously skewed. Ambassadors didn't
always know what they were reporting and sort of would
(18:32):
spin things however they solt fit. So what we do
have is her correspondence with Suleiman's salary records, Suleiman's diaries
and love letters, and rock Salona's letters to Sigismond the second,
and they paint a picture of a couple very much
invested in each other and a capable ruthless consort to
match a capable ruthless ruler, as Sarah put it to
(18:55):
me earlier. Yeah, but a lot of these documents weren't
known until the nineteen or twentieth Counry, and by that
point rox Salona had already gotten herself quite a reputation
as this manipulator, maybe a witch, you never know. UM.
English historian Richard Knolly's called her the greatest empress of
the East, which sounds like a compliment, but he also
(19:15):
portrayed her as this really wicked woman who controlled the
good Sultan entirely. UM. Eastern European histories go a little
more towards the Cinderella route, because after all, this is there, um,
this is their countrywoman. She's a slave who rises to
great power. But I mean, I think that you can
have a little bit of both. I mean, it seems
(19:37):
like she did exert quite amount of good, uh, but
you'd have to be ruthless. She was working within the
Harem structure, which is they based around ruthlessness essentially, and
for her survival, for her family's survival. She was of
course a slave to begin with, and she died the
wife of a sultan, the first sultan's wife in two
(19:58):
hundred years. So we say, well played, Roxelana. And if
you have a different opinion, feel free to email us
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We
also have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed
at Missed in History, and if you'd like to look
for some more great history articles, check out our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more
(20:23):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
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