Hürrem Sultan

Hürrem Sultan, known in Europe as Roxelana, rose from captivity in the imperial harem to become the legal wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the mother of his successor, Selim II. The first woman to hold the title haseki sultan, she was among the most powerful figures at the sixteenth-century Ottoman court, a major builder of charitable foundations, and the forerunner of the era of influential royal women often called the Sultanate of Women.

Almost nothing about her early life is documented. She was probably born around 1505 in Ruthenia, then under the Polish crown, and contemporaries described her as Russian or Ruthenian; one seventeenth-century poem made her the daughter of an Orthodox priest from Rohatyn. Her birth name is unknown, and names such as Aleksandra or Anastasia come from later tradition. Sometime between 1512 and 1520 she was seized in a slave raid by Tatars of the Crimean Khanate, probably passing through the slave market of Kaffa before being taken to Constantinople. In the harem she received the Persian name Hürrem, "the joyful one".

She became Suleiman's favourite concubine around the time he came to the throne in 1520, and their first son, Mehmed, was born in 1521. Breaking with custom, by which each concubine bore the sultan only one son, she had at least six children with him, five of them sons, and Suleiman gave up other partners. Her rivalry with Mahidevran, mother of his eldest son Mustafa, was reported by Venetian diplomats. Around 1534, perhaps in May of that year after the death of the sultan's mother, Suleiman freed Hürrem and married her in a public ceremony, an unprecedented step for an Ottoman ruler that scandalised many observers.

After her marriage she took charge of the harem and moved into the Topkapı Palace, the seat of government, instead of remaining in the Old Palace. Unlike earlier mothers of princes, she did not leave the capital when her sons went to govern provinces. Her surviving letters to Suleiman on campaign mix passionate devotion with news and political warnings. She also corresponded with foreign rulers, writing to Sigismund II Augustus of Poland after his accession in 1548 and sending embroidered gifts to the Safavid shah Tahmasp I in 1547.

Hürrem has long been blamed for the falls of Suleiman's grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, executed in 1536, and of Prince Mustafa, executed on his father's orders in 1553 during a campaign against the Safavid Empire, which cleared the way for her sons. Her son-in-law Rüstem Pasha served as grand vizier. Historians caution, however, that the stories of her intrigues rest on harem rumours reported by foreign diplomats and later writers, since outsiders had no access to the harem; none comes from first-hand sources.

Hürrem endowed charitable works across the empire. Her complex in Constantinople, the first commission of the architect Mimar Sinan as chief imperial architect, included a mosque, schools, a soup kitchen and a women's hospital. She built a bathhouse near Hagia Sophia, mosques in Edirne and Ankara, repaired the water channels serving Mecca, and in 1552 founded a soup kitchen in Jerusalem said to feed hundreds of people twice a day.

Hürrem died in Constantinople on 15 April 1558 of an unrecorded illness and was buried in a tiled mausoleum beside the one later built for Suleiman at the Süleymaniye Mosque. Her son Selim succeeded his father in 1566, so all later sultans descended from her. She has since been portrayed in novels, films and television series, especially in Ukraine and Turkey, among them the Turkish drama Muhteşem Yüzyıl (2011–2014).

Our 1530 map shows the Ottoman Empire early in Suleiman's reign, when she rose to prominence, and our 1600 map shows it in the generations after her.