Hürrem Sultan (; ; 1505"Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture" edited by Galina I. Yermolenko, p. 2 – 15 April 1558), also known as Roxelana, was the chief consort and legal wife of Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, mother of his successor Selim II, and the first haseki sultan of the Ottoman Empire. She became one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history,Galina Yermolenko (2005). Roxolana: The Greatest Empresse of the East. Muslim World, Volume 95, Issue 2, pp. 231–248. and the first in a series of prominent women who lived during the period that came to be known as the Sultanate of Women. She is commonly considered the most powerful Haseki Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Presumably born in Ruthenia to a Ruthenian Orthodox family, she was captured by Crimean Tatars during a slave raid and eventually taken via the Crimean trade to Constantinople, the Ottoman capital.
She entered the imperial harem, rose through the ranks and became the favorite concubine of Sultan Suleiman. Breaking Ottoman tradition, he unprecedentedly freed and married Hürrem, making her his legal wife. Sultans had previously married only foreign freeborn noblewomen, if at all, and even then they usually reproduced through slave concubines.Peirce, Leslie: The Imperial Harem (1993), Pg 44 She remained in the sultan's court for the rest of her life, enjoying an extremely loving and intimate relationship with her husband, and having at least six children with him, including the future sultan, Selim II, which makes her an ancestor of all the following sultans and present descendants of the Ottoman dynasty. Of Hürrem's six known children, five were male, breaking one of the oldest Ottoman customs according to which each concubine could only give the sultan one male child, to maintain a balance of power between the various women. However, not only did Hürrem bear more children to the sultan after the birth of her first son in 1521, but she was also the mother of all of Suleiman's children born after her entry in the harem at the very beginning of his reign.: "In reports to Europe, ambassadors wrote that the Turkish Sultan had become monogamous and, in fact, Süleyman did not have children with any other member of the harem for the rest of his reign."
Hürrem eventually wielded enormous power, influencing and playing a central role in the politics of the Ottoman Empire.Campo, Juan Eduardo: Encyclopedia of Islam, Pg 292 The correspondence between Suleiman and Hürrem, unavailable until the nineteenth century, along with Suleiman's own diaries, confirms her status as the Sultan's most trusted confidant and adviser. During his frequent absences, the pair exchanged passionate love letters. Hürrem included political information and warned of potential uprisings. She also played an active role in the affairs of the empire and even intervened in affairs between the empire and her former home, apparently helping Poland attain its privileged diplomatic status. She supposedly brought a "feminine touch" to diplomatic relations, sending diplomatic letters accompanied by personally embroidered articles to foreign leaders and their relatives. Two of these notable contemporaries were Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and Mahinbanu Sultan, the favorite sister and intimate counselor of Tahmasp I, who exchanged official letters with Hürrem as well as with an Ottoman imperial princess who was probably Mihrimah Sultan, daughter of Hürrem and Suleiman.McKay, John P.: "A history of Western society", Pg 491Guity Nashat and Lois Beck: Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, pp 154; pp 167: "Tahmasp Safavi, Tadhkira-yi Shah Tahmasp, MS British Library, Or. 5880, fol. 67b; Ichi, Tarikh, folio 70a. Hürrem Sultan’s letter and the reply are published in Shah Tahmasp, 343-48."
Hürrem patronized major public works (including the Haseki Sultan Complex and the Hürrem Sultan Hamam). She died in April 1558, in Constantinople and was buried in an elegant and beautifully adorned mausoleum adjacent to the site where her husband would join her eight years later in another mausoleum within the grand Süleymaniye Mosque complex in Istanbul.Turkey by Michelin Travel Publications (Firm), Page 161
Name
Leslie P. Peirce has written that her birth name may have been either Aleksandra or Anastazja Lisowska, but this is disputed. Primary sources of the 16th century do not record the premarital name and surname of Hürrem Sultan. In Polish tradition, her name was Alexandra,Abbott E. A history of mistresses. — HarperFlamingoCanada, 2003. — 510 p. — P. 53. and in Ukrainian, she was called Anastasia.Roxolana in European Literature… — P. 49. American researcher Galina Yermolenko suggests that the name Anastasia (or Nastya) had arisen in literature under the influence of folklore and, referring to Mykhailo Orlich,Mykhailo Orlich, Roksoliana, tsarivna soniachna Opillia (Lviv: Triada plius, 2002), 58–59. cites a Bukovinian folk song derived from Mauritius Goslavsky's poem "Podilla" (1827).according to YermolenkoV Rohatyni, na zarinku,Tam tatary vkraly divku,Vkraly divku Nastusen’ku,Chornobryvu, moloden’ku, Taj zabraly v Turetchynu,Taj prodaly do haremuEnglish translationIn Rohatyn, on the horizon,There the Tatars stole a girl,They stole a girl Nastusenka,A black eyebrowed, a young girl,And took her to Turkey,And sold her to a haremGalina Yermolenko. Roxolana: «The Greatest Empresse of the East», p. 234, 245. It is not known how original those stories are and whether they date back to before 1880, when the name Anastasia Lisovska first appeared in Mykhailo Orlovsky's Roksolana or Anastasia Lisovskaya.Орловский М. Я. Роксолана или Анастасия Лисовская: Ист. повесть. — Каменец-Подольский: Тип. Подол. губерн. правления, 1883. Her father's supposed name — Gavrylo LisovskyAbbott E. A history of mistresses. — HarperFlamingoCanada, 2003. — 510 p. — P. 53. — first appeared in works of fiction as well.
In European reports and accounts, Hürrem was always referred to as Rossa, Rosselana, Roxelana, Roxolana, or Roksolana (the latter two are also transliterations from ). This name was first used by the Holy Roman Empire ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in his compendium Turkish Letters (published in 1581 under the name ).Roxolana in European Literature… — P. 272.
Among the Ottomans, she was known mainly as Haseki Hürrem Sultan or Hürrem Haseki Sultan. Hürrem or Khurrem () means "the joyful and endearing one" in Persian. However, "Hürrem" was most likely not her first Ottoman name, especially as Suleiman is said to have named her himself.Aran, Lale Surmen: Rick Steves' Istanbul, Pg 209Encyclopedia of Ukraine Vol 4: "A district in old Istanbul retains the name Khurrem (‘laughing one’), Süleyman's pet name for Roksoliana." In the naming rite that masters arrogated to themselves, male and female owners often played the poet. They chose to confer — to impose — on their female slaves the names of flowers, precious stones, and other pleasures of life. For imperial concubines, endless variations of "rose", "grace", and "delicacy" were always in vogue. Hürrem must have acquired such a name upon her acceptance of Islam before she entered the imperial harem and became Suleiman's new concubine, but this name, if it existed, remains lost to history.Madeline C. Zilfi: Women and Slavery in the late Ottoman Empire16th century female slave names
Origin
While no documentation exists about Hürrem's life before she entered the harem, legends about her origins arose in literary works.Roxolana in European Literature… — P. 1. It has been claimed that she was of Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish, origin.
Many sources state that Hürrem came from Ruthenia, which was then part of the Polish Crown. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq called her "Roxelana" based on her supposed origin from the Ruthenian territory in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the time often known as Roxolania (from the Roxolani people mentioned by Strabo as inhabitants of the northern Black Sea region).In the 16th and 17th centuries Ruthenians — Orthodox inhabitants of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth who spoke one of the East Slavic dialects — were often called Roxolans in contrast to the Poles and Lithuanians, who were mainly Roman Catholics. The reason for this was the Roxolani theory, according to which Ruthenians descended from the "Sarmatian tribe of Roxolani", which gave Ruthenian nobility the opportunity to join the prevailing concept of Sarmatism, which justified special noble rights. Based on these ideas, Rus is often called Roxolania in Western and Ruthenian sources of the time.M. Stryjkowski. Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmudska i wszystkiej Rusi. — T. 1. — Warszawa, 1846. — S. 125.Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996. Samuel Twardowski in his poem "The Great Embassy" (written between 1621 and 1623, published in 1633) noted that her father was an Orthodox priest from Rohatyn (now a city in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine). Michalo Lituanus, former ambassador of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Crimean Khanate in the mid-16th century, wrote that "the wife of the present Turkish emperor who loves her dearly — mother of his primogenital [first] son who will govern after him, was kidnapped from our land".
The Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero called Hürrem "[donna] … di nazione russa". Another Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Battista Trevisano, called her "Sultana, ch'è di Rusi". The Venetian military leader Marco Antonio Bragadin also called Hürrem "donna di nazione russa". The belief that Hürrem was of Russian rather than Ukrainian origin may have resulted from the eventual misinterpretation of the words Rosselana and Rossa.
During the reign of Selim I, sometime between 1512 and 1520, the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate kidnapped her during one of their slave raids in Eastern Europe. The Tatars may have first taken her to the Crimean city of Kaffa, a major centre of the Ottoman slave trade, before she was taken to Constantinople."The Speech of Ibrahim at the Coronation of Maximilian II", Thomas Conley, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer 2002), 266.Kemal H. Karpat, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays, (Brill, 2002), p. 756.
According to Kutbeddin el-Mekki, an envoy of the sharif of Mecca, and the memoirs of Shaykh Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, a Meccan religious figure who visited Constantinople in 1558, she had been a servant in the household of Hançerli Hanzade Fatma Zeynep Sultan, daughter of Şehzade Mahmud and granddaughter of Sultan Bayezid II, who gifted her to Suleiman when he rose to the throne.
Relationship with Suleiman
Hürrem Sultan likely entered the harem around fifteen years of age. The precise year that she entered the harem is not recorded, but it's accepted that she became Suleiman's new favourite concubine around the time he became the sultan in 1520, because their first child was born in 1521.
Hürrem's unprecedented rise from a harem slave to Suleiman's legal wife attracted immense jealousy, acrimony and disfavor not only in the harem, but also from the general populace. By the early 1520s, she had become Suleiman's most prominent consort beside Mahidevran Hatun (c.1500), who was the mother of Suleiman's eldest surviving son. Before devoting himself exclusively to Hürrem and becoming monogamous, Suleiman had followed the precedent of his ancestors and taken a number of concubines when he was a prince but after becoming the sultan, he fell deeply in love with his new concubine, Hürrem.Blue Guide Istanbul (1991) by A. & C. Black (London); W.W. Norton (New York), Page 32: "Süleyman was so in love with her that he put aside all the other women in his harem and lived with her alone."