Princesses Behaving Badly (12 page)

So what was it about this young slave that ensnared the sultan so completely? After all, she entered the harem at the lowest level and found herself in competition with 300 other women, all of whom were attractive, interesting, or talented in some way. According to one ambassador, Roxolana was no beauty—she was short and a little fat, though she was elegant and modest, graced with fair skin and red hair. Suleiman’s initial attraction was probably based on her personality; she was pleasant and witty, played the guitar, and made him feel good. The name the Turks knew her by was Hurrem, meaning “joyful” or “laughing one.” Of course, detractors claimed that she held the sultan’s affection through love potions and sorcery; the Turkish public called her
ziadi
, or “witch.” She certainly was crafty. For example, when a fire destroyed the Old Seraglio, the palace where she and the other concubines lived, she demanded to be installed in the new palace with the sultan, giving her the advantage over rivals.

Once there, Roxolana never left. In either 1533 or 1534, not long after she moved in, the sultan married his red-haired concubine in a sumptuous ceremony outfitted with everything a good royal wedding should have: music, dancing, feasting, swings, giraffes. The marriage was a very big deal. As a contemporary reported, “There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.” That was because Suleiman was the first sultan to marry a concubine in three centuries; moreover, Roxolana was the first slave concubine in the history of the Ottoman Empire to be freed and made a legal wife.

As sultana, Roxolana enjoyed more latitude than other women who’d come before her (mothers of sultans, for example), often taking care of matters of state when the sultan was away. To combat public opinion that she was a witch, she worked hard to foster a reputation as a charitable
woman, doing good works and funding the construction of magnificent and useful buildings.

But all her privileges could easily disappear if Roxolana didn’t keep a tight grip on her power. She hadn’t fought her way out of the anonymity of the harem just to become the sultan’s trophy-wife broodmare. And that was why she set her sights on taking down the grand vizier. He was the only other person the sultan trusted, the only person at court with as much power as she had; plus she just didn’t like him. Ibrahim Pasha was no shrinking violet—this was a man who, when a poet slandered him in public, ordered the unfortunate man paraded around the city on a donkey and then strangled to death.

Roxolana made sure the sultan heard all the court gossip about the vizier and knew how much she disliked him. Ibrahim, meanwhile, didn’t do himself any favors at court: he was becoming increasingly arrogant and seemed to be making decisions without the sultan’s permission. Whispers that he was plotting against Suleiman were growing louder (perhaps because Roxolana was shouting them into her husband’s ear). On March 15, 1536, Ibraham’s battered corpse was found in his bloodstained bedroom. He’d been executed by the sinister deaf-mute assassins the sultan kept around for just such a purpose.

By the 1550s, Roxolana was a power unto herself, but even she needed allies. She soon formed a political faction with Rüstem Pasha, her daughter’s like-minded husband and the new grand vizier. On the opposite side was 37-year-old Prince Mustafa, Suleiman’s heir and son of the disgraced concubine Gulbahar. Though he governed a distant outpost of the empire, Mustafa was his father’s son in strength of mind, character, and ambition. He was also popular, whereas Roxolana’s sons were not.

Roxolana knew that if Mustafa took the throne, she’d be either killed or sent back to the Old Seraglio, home to second-string wives and used concubines. She also knew that for Mustafa to clear a path to the throne, he’d need to have her sons murdered. She had only one option: make sure he never got the chance.

Popular legend claims that Roxolana first tried to dispatch Mustafa herself, sending a gift of poisoned clothing. When that failed, she used her influence to get the sultan to do her dirty work for her. In 1553 Mustafa was executed by his father on the pretext that he was planning to assassinate the sultan and usurp the throne. In the minds of the Turkish public and politicians, Roxolana and Rüstem Pasha were responsible for trumping up the charges and turning the sultan against his son; some even claimed that Roxolana used witchcraft to poison her husband’s affections. Rüstem Pasha took the fall—he was stripped of his title on the day Mustafa was executed. The demotion was only temporary, however; Roxolana’s insistent urging brought him back to his old position two years later.

Concubines in the Ottoman Empire lived, bore children, and died by the thousands without anyone ever knowing their names. Roxolana’s charm must have been great, indeed, for her to sway the sultan into making an honest woman out of her.

But all wasn’t due to her craftiness and scheming. At the heart of the story is something a bit wonderful—love. Suleiman loved Roxolana dearly, and for the most part faithfully, for the better part of four decades. His deep devotion is evident not only in how he treated her but also in what he wrote to and about her. One of his poems reveals the depth of his feelings: “My intimate companion, my one and all/sovereign of all beauties, my sultan./My life, the gift I own, my be-all,/my elixir of Paradise, my Eden.”

Roxolana seems to have loved her husband back in equal measure. During his frequent absences, she wrote him constantly, sparing no detail of her days, the children’s health, and life at court. She wrote, “My Lord, your absence has kindled a fire in me that does not abate.”

When Roxolana died in 1558 (of causes unknown), Suleiman was heartbroken. He built her a beautiful mausoleum, making her the first harem woman to be buried in such grandeur. The sultan died eight years later, suffering from gout, arthritis, an ulcer on his leg, and a blood feud for the throne between his two remaining sons.

Catherine Radziwill

M
ARCH
30, 1858–M
AY
12, 1941
G
ERMANY AND
S
OUTH
A
FRICA

O
ver a few weeks in 1884, fashionable Europeans were shocked and scandalized, as well as highly amused, by the letters of one Count Paul Vasili published in a French magazine. The “count” was supposedly a diplomat at the Berlin court of Kaiser Wilhelm I, though everyone knew the name was a pseudonym.

Whoever he was, he appeared to have access to all the most important people, whom he ruthlessly skewered, calling them out by name and revealing their every fault. On Empress Augusta: “She is intriguing, false, and affected. She has no dignity and notion of propriety.… She surrounds herself with courtiers and favorites who are the first to speak ill of their
Imperial mistress.” And the court: “Adultery flourishes like a plant in its chosen soil.… Virtue is among the number things regarded as useless. As to love, one meets with it rarely. In Berlin society, they take and quit each other according to their fancy.” About Berlin’s well-to-do
Frauen
: “The high-class Berlin woman neither reads, works, nor has any occupation. She passes her time in chattering, dressing and undressing, and seeking who will help her in these things. She has neither a serious idea in her head, not a worthy thought in her heart.… She is wanting in grace, education, and tact.” In short, Berlin was a tar pit of intolerance, provincial manners, sexual intrigue, gossip, and dissolution. The letters proved so popular that they were reprinted in a book called, appropriately enough,
Berlin Society
.

Not surprisingly, Berlin society wasn’t pleased. The royal court, seat of the German Empire, was only about 15 years old, and the city itself only lately raised from a unsophisticated, dirt-road backwater. Its inhabitants were a bit touchy about that fact, and to see themselves mocked by someone who’d been allowed into the inner circle was just too much. The real writer, however, was not a diplomat at all but one of their own—26-year-old Princess Catherine Radziwill.

Born Countess Ekaterina Adamevna Rzewuska, the daughter of an exiled Polish noble in what is now Ukraine, Catherine grew up in a castle haunted since the days when a family member decided to brick his mother alive in the tower in order to get his inheritance. At age 15, Catherine was married off to Prince Adam Karl Wilhelm Radziwill, a 28-year-old Polish exile living in Berlin. It was a quick and drab ceremony. In 1873 Catherine, who’d spent time in Paris and St. Petersburg, made her entrance into Berlin society; she was not impressed.

Catherine always had an acerbic wit, which she now used to show her disdain for the kaiser’s newly established court; one British ambassador noted that she was feared in court for her “mordant tongue.” Encouraged by her aunt (widow of the French writer Honoré de Balzac), Catherine turned her sharp observations into words, first through letters and then
later in the scathing and anonymous
Berlin Society
.

Gossip was all well and good, but what Catherine was really passionate about was politics, a sphere that, as a woman, she could never fully inhabit. When not pregnant (she had five children by age 22), she spent her days listening to speeches at the German Parliament. Her thwarted political ambitions turned her toward journalism, and before long people began to suspect that it was her “mordant tongue” behind
Berlin Society
. In 1885 she and her husband were forced to decamp for St. Petersburg, though Catherine didn’t mind; she obviously hated Berlin and felt much more Russian in spirit, a reflection of her mother’s heritage. She never fully acknowledged her expulsion from court, only later claiming that Empress Augusta didn’t like her because she was guilty of the “inexcusable crime of having written a book, a most innocent book by the way.” That book was by no means the last Catherine would write, nor would it be the final example of her writing to get her into trouble.

The next few years were not kind to the princess—her efforts to become an influential political matchmaker in St. Petersburg yielded little fruit, and the ascension of Tsar Nicholas II, who had no time for her, rendered her even less useful. As her marriage was breaking down and her children were leaving the nest, Catherine devoted her attention to political journalism. But without the support of the tsar, she lacked the one thing that had made her more than just another witty writer: access. What Catherine needed was another political situation into which she could insinuate herself.

In February 1896, she found the perfect circumstance while at a dinner party in London. That night, she was seated next to Cecil Rhodes, a British-born South African statesman (namesake of Rhodesia and founder of the Rhodes scholarship). The former prime minister of the British Cape colony was at a career low. Only a month earlier, he’d been forced to resign after the disastrous Jameson Raid, a failed attempt to invade and overthrow the government of the Boer republic of Transvaal. The raid was led by Dr. Leander Jameson, Rhodes’s right-hand man, and
had Rhodes’s approval.

Rhodes soon forgot Catherine almost completely, but she sure remembered him. In 1897, about a year and a half after their meeting, she wrote to him declaring that she had at first been suspicious of him but now realized his greatness. Moreover, she was “blessed or cursed with the gift of second sight” and had visions of harm coming to him within six months. She enclosed a gold charm and begged him to wear it. Rhodes, it appears, was favorably impressed—the letter was kept, and so was the amulet. She wrote him again a year and a half later, this time asking for investment advice. He wrote back, advising her to invest in the Mashonaland Railway.

At this point, Catherine was living alone in Paris; depressed and increasingly poor, she turned a bit stalker, at least according to Rhodes’s secretary at the time, Philip Jourdan. In his memoirs, Jourdan recounts how Rhodes was trying to book passage to Africa but had to cancel and rebook several times. Catherine, too, was making frequent trips to the travel agent to learn Rhodes’s plans and remake hers accordingly. So no one was at all surprised when Rhodes finally did set sail for South Africa in July 1899 and Catherine floated into the first-class dining room.

At 41 years old, Catherine was still pretty; she was also connected, intelligent, and versed in politics. And to the embarrassment of the dinner table, she showed herself to be extremely candid about her reasons for traveling to South Africa—she reportedly declared that her husband, whom she was divorcing, was a terrible brute and she was desperate to leave Europe. Jourdan claimed that she once fainted into Rhodes’s arms, wholly undone by her terrible plight (no other passengers saw this bizarre behavior, mind you). Rhodes was at least charmed enough to offer a standing invitation to his home when they reached their destination.