The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (16 page)

Now the Osmans were indeed
ghazis
, not only in name but in fact. The nomadic Mongrel chieftain had emerged as truly a killer of infidels, a holy warrior, a
Ghazi
Sultan. Mehmet the Conqueror renamed the Osman family Ottoman and, seduced by dreams of empire, took on the additional title of Padishah — the Persian word for “emperor.”

Gradually the Osmans’ nomad tents gave way to palaces; their horses began to share primacy with gunpowder; their dervishes were folded into traditional Islam, now the official religion of the empire. And, since empires cry out for dynasties, the harem — that safe haven for warriors’ wives — took on a new shape as a hothouse in which to procreate male heirs to the Ottoman dynasty.

In this new imperial harem, each time the Sultan bedded a girl the event was entered in a velvet-bound couching book, a diary kept by the Chief Treasurer to establish beyond doubt the birth and legitimacy of the Sultan’s children. The name of the concubine and the precise day and hour of the encounter were meticulously recorded by the palace scribe and countersigned by the Sultan. There could be no margin for error when, any time the Sultan couched one of his harem concubines, the result might well be the birth of the next heir to the largest and richest empire in the world since Roman times.

Such a momentous outcome could not be left to the vagaries of passion. Or fancy. Or even pleasure. By the time the Conqueror’s great-great-grandson Suleiman became Sultan, copulation in the harem had long since been wrung dry of delight by the grinding machinery of protocol — officially. But unofficially, there were and always had been women in and out of Topkapi Palace.

This arrangement suited the Ottomans, as dedicated to Oriental formality as the Byzantines but also adroit at accommodating human frailty. Suleiman, as well as being the Shadow of God on Earth, was also flesh and blood. In emulation of his forefathers, he tended to avoid direct defiance of tradition. Instead, like his sires, he simply took what he wanted when he wanted it, leaving his courtiers to clean up whatever mess ensued. And, as long as he did not indulge himself too frequently or too blatantly, all eyes turned away, including the eyes of his mother, the Valide Sultan.

This style of accommodation also appealed to the Sultan’s subjects, a people at the same time hot-blooded and coldly formal, who had no difficulty rearranging the geographic boundaries of two continents, but who would resist to the death an alteration in the way a turban was wound. For the Turks and for the Sultan himself — who was, after all, one of them — there was no incongruence between the formal bedding practiced in the harem and the casual couplings in his private quarters in Topkapi Palace. A cart could be dispatched discreetly to pick up a small party of visitors (or, if the Sultan so directed, a single visitor) and bring the guests to his
selamlik.
Removed from harem protocol, what happened there need not be recorded in any book. If an inconvenient pregnancy were to occur, it would be neatly terminated by the court abortionist.

At the outset, when the Ottomans were still Osmans, they had contracted dynastic marriages with other ruling tribes. But by the reign of Mehmet, the Ottomans no longer had need of military allies, so they ceased to marry princesses and turned to concubines to produce their heirs. These girls, being slaves, came unencumbered by powerful and protective fathers and brothers.

And for one hundred years the Ottoman sultans lived two separate lives — the official one of the harem and the unacknowledged one of the Sultan’s
selamlik —
untroubled by interfering in-laws
.
Everyone knew who occupied the heavily curtained wagons that traversed the city streets from the Old Palace to Topkapi and back in the dark. But by common consent the identity of the occupants of the anonymous vehicles, indeed the ownership of the vehicles themselves, was not a subject for speculation. Not even thought of. Simply a fact of life.

But now, after more than a century of discretion, an intruder had disturbed the established order. A red-headed vixen not even beautiful, say those who saw her being sold in the slave market where the Grand Vizier bought her as a gift for his master. Somewhat skinny, more like a boy than a girl, they said. And with an unseemly air of flamboyance — almost defiance. Unlike the Circassian virgins traditionally favored by Ottoman Sultans ever since they began to beget children with slave girls instead of wives, this one was a Russian. With green eyes. She was called Hürrem, the Laughing One. Modest girls did not laugh.

In the streets and bazaars, heads shook at the mention of Hürrem — one day, a piece of bought meat, the next, a
kadin
, a Mother of Princes. Some say she bought filters and potions from Jewish peddlers that she placed in the Sultan’s mouth when she kissed him. And in the stews down at the port, where gossip was served and consumed faster than wine, they said she was a witch.

Of course a good Muslim did not believe in black magic. But, if not from spells and incantations, where did this Hürrem get her power over the Sultan? If not through witchery, how did she get his permission to show herself at the celebration of the circumcision of their sons (as no
kadin
in memory had ever done), where she sat enthroned on the balcony of the Grand Vizier’s palace while the crowd below gawked? True, she was veiled. Even so . . .

If the First
Kadin
, Rose of Spring, or any other Mother of Princes had taken such a liberty, she would have been tied in a sack full of stones and dumped into the Bosphorus. But for this Russian, it was not enough to be a
kadin
, the Mother of Princes. Although she had managed in short order to produce two sons, with another, by Allah’s grace, on the way, she still must take her place in line behind the mother of the Sultan’s first son and heir, Prince Mustafa. Like it or not, she was the Second
Kadin
. Yet she acted as if she were the First. And today she was taking a liberty that not even the Valide Sultan would dare. She had commandeered the Sultan’s gilded coach!

Without even a
tugra
to mark its owner as the Sultan, this vehicle had no need of identification. There was no other like it in the city. Nor, for that matter, anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. There was only one other in the world, owned by an Italian Marchesana named Isabella D’Este who captivated all Rome dashing about in it until, alas, the city was sacked by the Christian king of Spain and she was forced to flee for her life, sans coach. What the imperial mercenaries did with it during the sack of Rome, God only knows. Probably melted it down for the gold in the fittings. But years before the sack of Rome, Sultan Suleiman in connivance with his good friend, the Venetian
bailo
(they had since fallen out), arranged to have Isabella D’Este’s coach duplicated in the workrooms of Murano: a perfect miniature room on wheels with glass windows set into its gilded doors. Venetians could accomplish miracles if the price was right.

Somehow the
bailo
had
managed to smuggle a pair of engineers into the Colonna Palace where the Marchesana was living to take the measurements of her coach. (Apparently, the Marchesana Isabella was not living in her own palace but was renting a palace from the noble Roman Colonna family. Imagine it! Renting out their palace like common innkeepers. The Sultan would never understand these Europeans.) And now Suleiman had his own golden coach, reserved solely for his use on those days when his gout was bothering him or when he simply chose not to ride his horse.

It was this conveyance that the Second
Kadin
had chosen to commandeer for her ride across town this morning to welcome the Sultan back from his Austrian triumph. And there were few in the crowds witnessing her ride who did not curse the upstart bitch for rubbing it in their eyes that in his absence, she ruled.

Inside the carriage the Lady Hürrem could not help but hear the hisses of the passersby as she rode through the streets. Did she care that she was hated? Had she no fear? No shame?

The answer was very little, if any of either. She was a Russian, after all, and Russian women were bold. And canny. They said she wrote to the Sultan every day when he was campaigning in Austria. Not herself, of course. She could not write in Turkish. But some of her letters had been copied and sold in the bazaar. Do not ask by whom. That scribe’s head would be mounted on a pike in the First Court if his name were even whispered.

Unhappy, Hürrem longed for her adored Padishah, she wrote. She sighed for him. His children cried for him. They could not wait for the sight of his beloved face. How sad it was, she wrote, that the route of his victory parade did not take his procession past the Old Palace so that his children could see with their own eyes their father, the greatest king in the world, make a triumphant entry into his capital. An old woman in the Valide Sultan’s household had told her that in the days of the first Osman
ghazis
, their wives came out into the streets to welcome them home from their victories. Of course Hürrem was not a wife, only a poor slave. But even a slave could dream.

She went on to write of her longing to be granted a place among the multitude of the Sultan’s lesser subjects who were permitted to witness his triumphant return. How long must she wait, behind the distant walls of the harem in the Old Palace, for sight of him? What she would give to see him pass through the Imperial Gate, victorious once again over that European upstart, the so-called emperor! As if there could be any emperor but her own adored one.

That was how she addressed him in her letters. Mountains of flattery so high that even a sultan could not see over the top. And the result? Today she was riding up to Palace Point in his golden coach, now approaching the Imperial Gate of Topkapi Palace.

“Halt the carriage!” The captain of the Palace Guard stepped directly in the way of the vehicle. “Identify yourself. Who rides within?”

A Janissary captain was a formidable force. But the Second
Kadin
was not easily intimidated.

“Show him the document,” she instructed her companion, the princess Saida. “Wait. You must pull your sleeves down over your hands.” Allah forbid should the Janissary glimpse so much as an inch of the princess’s flesh. The girl had a lot to learn. “Now pass the paper through the slit in the curtain and make sure he doesn’t touch you.”

The captain of the Guard, well schooled in these matters, took the rolled-up scroll that was being handed to him, making certain to avert his eyes. Then, stepping back, he untied the satin ribbon and read for the benefit of his sergeant:

To the Chief of the Palace Guards,

Greetings from your Commander and Sultan! The esteemed Lady Hürrem, Second
Kadin
of the harem (inside the carriage, Hürrem winced at the word “second”) will arrive at the Imperial Gate on the day of my return from Austria. She is to be welcomed and conducted to the Diwan Tower, there to be made comfortable in my rooms at the top of the tower together with any ladies in her train.

Sealed with the Sultan’s
tugra
.

The Janissary captain waved the coach through the Imperial gate and into the First Court.

“That was the Bosphor
Kadin
,” he informed his sergeant once the coach was out of earshot. “Smell this.” He waved the document back and forth under the other’s nose. “That’s her scent. I’ll bet you it cost our Sultan more for a drop of that stuff than he pays us in a month.”

Hürrem was not popular with the Janissaries. They were the ones who named her the Bosphor
Kadin
— the Sewer
Kadin
.

12

THE DIWAN TOWER

The keeper of the Diwan Tower was an old man without malice. But he was a Turk. He was not comfortable with change. So when an unfamiliar clatter on the stairs told him that today’s visitors were women, his foot began to jiggle irritably. His orders spoke only of visitors. He assumed, as would anyone who understood the customs of Topkapi, that the Diwan Tower was off limits to all but a chosen few — each one of them, a man.

When he was in residence, the Padishah tended to make his appearances at the tower unannounced, looming up out of the darkness, sometimes accompanied by only one page. He would stand at the edge peering through the lozenge-shaped slits in the balustrade looking for . . . what? Enemies approaching through the Dardanelles? His own fleet tucked neatly into the Golden Horn? The caiques
and barges plying their way back and forth across the Bosphorus?

Sometimes when the keeper was alone, he walked over to the balustrade and placed himself just as the Sultan did, gazing south toward the Sea of Marmara, trying to imagine the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and beyond to the far western limits of the Ottoman Empire, Algeria, and Tunis. Then he pivoted eastward, just as the Sultan did, toward Syria, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Then a half-turn toward Üsküdar, and farther to Bosnia, Wallachia, and Hungary, the Magnificent Suleiman’s most recent conquest.