A captive from Ruthenia became the legal wife of Suleiman the Magnificent
Seized by Crimean Tatar raiders as a girl and sold into Constantinople's slave trade, the woman Europeans called Roxelana rose from the imperial harem to become Suleiman the Magnificent's most trusted confidante. Breaking long custom, he freed and married her, and their son became Sultan Selim II.
Hürrem Sultan was born around 1505, probably to a Ruthenian Orthodox family in lands then belonging to the Polish Crown. Sometime between 1512 and 1520 Crimean Tatars captured her in a slave raid, perhaps passing through Kaffa, a hub of the Ottoman slave trade, before she reached the capital. Her original name is unknown; the historian Leslie Peirce mentions Aleksandra or Anastazja Lisowska, a suggestion that is disputed. Europeans called her Roxelana, a label popularised by the Habsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq after the Latin name for Ruthenian lands. Hürrem, likely a name Suleiman chose, means joyful and endearing in Persian.
She probably entered the harem at about fifteen and became Suleiman's favourite around his accession in 1520; their first child arrived in 1521. Suleiman then scandalised the court by giving up all other partners and marrying off his other concubines to officials. By 1524 all Constantinople knew he spent his nights with one woman. She bore him at least six children in ten years. Previous sultans had wed only freeborn foreign noblewomen, if they married at all, so freeing and marrying a former slave was unprecedented, and she became the first haseki sultan.
Her rise provoked fierce jealousy inside the palace and among ordinary people, and she competed with Mahidevran, mother of Suleiman's eldest son. Yet her influence grew enormous. Letters between the couple, unknown until the nineteenth century, together with Suleiman's diaries, show she was his closest adviser and a central player in imperial politics.
Her patronage paid for large building projects in the capital, among them a charitable complex bearing her title and a grand public bath in her name. She died in Constantinople in April 1558 and was buried in an ornate mausoleum beside the site where Suleiman would be laid to rest eight years later.
Source: Hürrem Sultan
