Reading the Other:
Roxolana in European History and Literature

Galina I. Yermolenko
DeSales University

But what do we know about the seraglio . . . except what is spawned by [our] own Western
imagination? – Alan Grosrichard

     The story of Roxolana – or Hurrem Sultan, as she is known in Turkish history – has been surrounded by much legend and controversy since the sixteenth century. This extraordinary woman, believed to have been born in western Ukraine around 1505, is known for her unprecedented imperial career, during which she had risen from a captive and a harem concubine to the pinnacle of power in the Ottoman Empire – the beloved wife and close advisor of Sultan Suleiman I, the Magnificent (1520-1566). She remained the Sultan’s favorite (haseki) and political confidante for four decades, until her death in 1558. She became legendary not only because of Suleiman’s long-term devotion to her, but also because of her significant impact on the life of the Ottoman Empire. She built mosques and charitable foundations, influenced the Sultan’s domestic and foreign politics, and radically changed the balance of power in the imperial harem. But she was also associated with some of the darkest events of Suleiman’s reign that undoubtedly affected the course of the Ottoman history, such as the execution of the Sultan’s heir apparent, Mustafa, in 1553.
     The combination of romantic love with royal intrigue and grand-scale history in Roxolana’s life excited the European imagination for centuries. Folk legends, historical and quasi-historical narratives, and fictional stories about Roxolana have circulated in Europe since the early modern times, and more stories emerged in the Turkish, French, German, Italian, English, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian languages in the later centuries. In the course of the continuous retelling of her story throughout the ages, the facts and fiction merged imperceptibly into a legend of enormous proportions. From a story of an exotic individual it turned into a site of various cultural fantasies and constructions.
     The present paper traces the formation of the Roxolana legend in European history and literature as part of a larger cultural process – the West’s formation of the image of the Other. First, I demonstrate how the early modern western image of Roxolana was formed on the basis of the Ottoman view of Hurrem, which was transmitted to Europe by contemporaneous western travelers and diplomats. I then show how the Roxolana image was evolving parallel to the shifts in the West’s perception of the “Turk” and of women in power. While in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries she was perceived as a ruthless schemer and opportunist, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, she came to embody western fantasies of the quintessential sultana and the Asian harem.
     The Roxolana story begins with the rumors recorded in the diplomatic correspondence of western ambassadors and travelers to the Sublime Porte in the course of the sixteenth century. Most notable of these were the reports of three Venetian ambassadors at Suleiman’s court, Pietro Bragadino (1526), Bernardo Navagero (1553), and Domenico Trevisano (1554)¹; a travel account, Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de’ Turchi (1545), by an Italian visitor to Turkey, Luigi Bassano da Zara²; and Augerii Gislenii Turcicae legationes epistolae quatuor (1589), or The Turkish Letters, by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Emissary of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand to the Porte between 1554 and 1562.³
     These sources informed their readers of a powerful concubine in the imperial harem who bore the Sultan four sons – Mahomet, Selim, Bayazid, and Jihangir – and a daughter, Mihrimah. Europeans living in Istanbul called her Roxolana, Rosselane, Rossa, or Rosa, in reference to her Russian origin,⁴ although at Suleiman’s court she was known as Hurrem (‘Joyful’ or ‘The Laughing One’), because of her charming smile, playful temperament, and musical talent. Suleiman’s exceptional treatment of his hasseki was a topic of great interest for the western observers. To Hurrem’s benefit, the Sultan broke practically every article of the imperial harem protocol that there was. Around 1533 or 1534 (the exact date is unknown), Suleiman wedded Hurrem in a formal ceremony his and bestowed a dowry of 5,000 ducats upon her. The event shook both the Ottoman and Western worlds. “In doing this,” wrote Busbecq, “he violated the custom of the sultans who had preceded him, none of whom had contracted a marriage since the time of Bajazet I.”⁵
     Roxolana’s astonishing success at Suleiman’s court was attributed not only to her beauty and vivacity, her intelligence and ambition, but also to her wickedness and witchcraft, in which she was reportedly assisted by a famous Jewish sorceress. In the latter case, the Western reports replicated the negative view of Hurrem on the part of the Ottoman public, which was very troubled by Suleiman’s violation of the old imperial tradition. As Luigi Bassano wrote, Suleiman “le porta tal’amore che fa merauigliare tutti i suoi sudditi, in tanto che dicono ch’ella l’ha ammaliato, perche la chiamano Ziadi, che vuol dir Strega” [‘bears her such love and keeps such faith to her that all his subjects marvel and say that she has bewitched him, and they call her Ziadi, which means witch’].⁶ Busbecq also cited the Turkish public’s belief that Roxolana used witchcraft in order to entice Suleiman. While describing the Turkish belief that the hyena had a great potency in love, he mentioned a few hyena owners residing in Istanbul, who were reluctant to sell them because they were saving them for the Sultana, “as the Sultan’s wife was commonly reputed to retain his affection by love-charms and magic arts.”⁷
     Hurrem was particularly hated by the Turkish public after 1553, when the Sultan executed – as it was widely believed, through the haseki’s intrigues – his first-born son Mustafa, who was favored by the Janissaries as Suleiman’s successor.⁸ They believed that Hurrem had plotted the removal of Mustafa in order to secure the throne for her own sons, and that she achieved her goal by enlisting the assistance of her son-in-law, Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha, and by taking advantage of her husband’s suspicious nature, which was increasing with age. Busbecq wrote: “The Turks . . . are convinced that it was by the calumnies of Roostem and the spells of Roxolana, who was in ill repute as a practiser of witchcraft, that the sultan was so estranged from his son as to entertain the design of getting rid of him.”⁹ Moreover, Roxolana was blamed for plotting the death of the murdered Mustapha’s young son.¹⁰
     The Turkish public’s negative view of Hurrem laid the foundation for the early modern western image of Roxolana. Sixteenth-century diplomats and travelers largely replicated popular rumors circulating around Istanbul at the time, as they could hardly have had any access to the sultan’s seraglio and his inner circle, which were carefully protected from strangers (the word harem meaning a “sacred, prohibited place”). The misconceptions about Roxolana also resulted from putting too much stress on her psychological traits, while ignoring the larger political and social context in which she lived and acted, such as the structure of the Ottoman slave family and system. In the overcrowded and strictly regulated world of the harem, where fratricide (that is, execution of all the brothers of a new sultan in order to prevent feuds between royal siblings) was often utilized, Roxolana had to fight fiercely for her survival. If Mustafa were to become sultan, not only Roxolana, but also all her sons, and the sons of her sons, would be doomed.¹¹
     Historian Leslie Pierce argued that the accusations of Hurrem as a relentless and power-greedy witch resulted from the conflict between the two opposing roles she performed in the Ottoman harem – the sultan’s favorite (a sexual role) and the sultan’s lawful wife (a post-sexual role) – the roles that had always been separated in the Ottoman tradition and were collapsed for the first time in Hurrem. She was thus “caught between two conflicting loyalties: mother to the prince, and wife to the sultan,” which caused her ambiguous legal status and the consequent animosity on the part of the Ottoman public.¹²
     It is Roxolana’s controversial role in the murder of Mustafa (or Mustapha, as Europeans spelt this name) that made her such a notorious figure in the Western Christendom. The story was very colorfully and dramatically described in a 1555 pamphlet, just two years after the tragic events, by Nicholas de Moffan, a Burgundian noble and erstwhile Turkish captive and prisoner.¹³ Moffan put the entire blame on the wicked Rosa (as he called Roxolana), who through her feminine charms, tricks, and sorcery, as well as through the machinations of her son-in-law, Grand Vizier Rustem, managed to persuade Soliman that Mustapha intended to take the throne from him with the support of the janissaries and other soldiers. Moffan spared no dark colors in painting the gruesome portrait of the “vngratious,” “deuilishe,” and “pestilent” woman, who “ceased not to corrupt the Kyng’s mynde” with various female tricks, sometimes with the promise of other women, sometimes with tears, “which Women neuer want in cloaked matter,” and “sometimes with sundry other adulations.”¹⁴ Finally, the Sultan’s mind was so incensed with suspicions that he summoned Mustapha to his tent in Aleppo and ordered his mutes to strangle the Prince on the spot. The story goes that Suleiman was watching this “Cruell Spectacle” from behind a veil and even encouraged the mutes to finish off the resisting Prince promptly, and that soon after the murder, one of Suleiman’s sons by Rosa, the hunchback Gianger (Jihangir), stabbed himself to death out of sorrow.¹⁵
     To demonstrate Rosa’s wile and law-breaking ways, Moffan also presented a story of how Rosa tricked Soliman into marrying her. Rosa approached a Mufti (that is, chief Muslim juror) with a question of whether her erecting a mosque and a hospital for pilgrims would be profitable for her salvation. The Mufti replied that because she was the sultan’s bondwoman (that is, his property), all her good deeds will be credited to her master. At this news, Rosa fell into sorrow, and the loving sultan hurried to manumit her. Rosa’s next step was to refuse the sultan physical intimacy on the grounds that as a free woman, possessing free will, she would be committing a carnal sin by going to bed with a man, whether a sultan or not. This rebuff added more fuel to Soliman’s burning passion for Rosa, and he married Rosa in violation of the Ottoman tradition.¹⁶
     Moffan’s pamphlet became an instant hit throughout Europe; it was translated into several European languages and reprinted a number of times.¹⁷ Equally influential in this regard were Ogier de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters (first letter published in 1581; all four letters, in 1589) which were reprinted repeatedly during the seventeenth century and became enormously popular in Western Europe.¹⁸ While Busbecq’s eloquent letters differed significantly from the anti-Islamic and misogynist diatribe of Moffan’s pamphlet, they uncritically reiterated and transmitted to the West the Ottoman rumors about Roxolana’s witchcraft and her plot against Mustapha. One can even say that Moffan’s and Busbecq’s books sealed Roxolana’s negative image in the early modern Western imagination.
     The view of Roxolana as a clever but relentless enchantress was then replicated in numerous contemporary historical compilations, which widely circulated around the continent in various editions and languages, such as Paolo Giovio’s Turcicorum rerum commentarius (1537) and Historiarvm sui tempores (1552); Bartholomew Georgievi’s De Origine Imperii Tvrcorvm (1560); Hugh Gough’s The offsprings of the House of Ottomano (1570); Philipp Lonicer’s Chronicorvm tvrcicorvm (1584); Johannes Leunclavius’s Annales svltanorvm Othamanidorvm (1588); Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Vitae et icones svltanorum Tvrcicorvm (1596); Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); and Michel Baudier’s Inventaire de l’histoire generale des Turcs (1617). Many of these compilations used the details of Moffan’s and Busbecq’s accounts rather loosely, so the real-life story eventually turned into a semi-legendary and semi-literary matter.
     Suleiman’s execution of Mustapha became an ultra-popular topic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European literature and drama, spawning numerous French, Italian, and English tragedies: e.g., Gabriel Bounin’s La Soltane (1561); the anonymous Latin play Solymannidae Tragoedia (1581); Georges Thilloys’ Solyman II (1608); Fulke Greville’s The Tragedy of Mustapha (1609); Prospero Bonarelli’s Il Solimano (1620); Antonio Cospi’s Il Mustafa (1636); Jean de Mairet’s Le Grand et Dernier Solyman ou la mort de Mustapha (1635); and Roger Boyle’s The Tragedy of Mustapha (1668). The interest in this matter, with an added emphasis on Jihangir’s sacrifice, continued well into the eighteenth century, particularly in French and German drama, as is evident in the tragedies of François Belin (Mustapha et Zéangir, 1705), David Mallet (Mustapha, 1739), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Giangir, oder der verschmähte Thron (fragment, 1748), Christian Weisse (Mustapha und Zeangir, 1761), Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort (Mustapha et Zéangir, 1778), and Louis-Jean-Baptiste de Maisonneuve (Roxelane et Mustapha, 1785). Even the eighteenth-century European opera – e.g., Johann Hasse’s Solimano (Dresden, 1753) and David Perez’s Solimano (Lisbon, 1757) – was inspired by the Mustapha plot.¹⁹
     The interest in the Mustapha story reflected the West’s general fear of and fascination with the Turks. Despite the negative view of them as the “present terrour of the world,”²⁰ early modern Europeans admired Suleiman’s military genius and his wise rule,²¹ as well as the proverbial religious tolerance of the Turks, which contrasted sharply with the ongoing religious strife in Europe. At the same time, the atrocity and violence replete in Turkish history gave the western world an opportunity to reflect and moralize on the nature of tyranny, monarchy, and power.  But the tragic events at Suleiman’s court also tapped into two specific issues with which the West was preoccupied at home: dynastic legitimacy, in connection with the dynastic disputes between the sons of Catherine de Medici in France and the Tudor dynastic struggle after the death of Henry VIII in England), and female rule, as a number of powerful females, such as Catherine de Medici, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth Tudor, ascended to power in the sixteenth century. In the context of these female sovereigns’ continuous struggle with inner religious and political dissent (the Huguenot opposition during Catherine de Medici’s reign and the Roman Catholic opposition during Queen Elizabeth’s reign), the ability of a female ruler to maintain order and to reign wisely was frequently challenged. Addressing Mary Tudor’s rule, John Knox wrote, in his famous The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558): “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.”²²
     Thus Roxolana’s enormous influence on the political developments in the Ottoman state was perceived as a female threat to the patriarchal order. In the Mustapha political drama, Europeans saw a warning against a powerful female whose machinations brought about a violation of the law and state order. Such a view was prevalent in most historical works on Turkish matters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For instance, Jean-Jacques Boissard, in his famous chronicle Vitae et icones svltanorum Tvrcicorvm (1596), placed overmuch emphasis on the bewitched Suleiman’s violation of the Islamic law when he married Roxolana. In a separate chapter devoted to Roxolana’s life, he stressed her cruel heart and her use of magical potions with which she weakened the Sultan’s will: “Vtrumque & matrem et filias incantationibus philtrisque à Trongilla venefica Iudaea alienaverat à Solymanno Rossa: quae omni ratione conabatur filiis suis Imperium adstuere” [‘Through her charms and the potions obtained from Trongilla, a Jewish sorceress, Rossa alienated Solyman from him (i.e., Mustapha), and also mothers and daughters; she used all schemes possible to promote her own sons to the imperial throne’].²³
     In a similar tone, English historian Richard Knolles gave a most scathing portrayal of Roxolana and her role in the execution of Mustapha.²⁴ Knolles deemed her the “mistresse of his [Suleiman’s] thoughts” and the “commandresse of him that all commaunded,” and he blamed her deceptive beauty, mischievous designs, and sorcery for the disruption of the empire’s political order and the eventual decline of the Ottoman state.²⁵ Knolles reprinted the portrait of Roxolana (an engraving by Theodore de Bry) from Boissard and accompanied it with a similar verse, emphasizing the gap between Roxolana’s beautiful appearance and her poisonous essence: 

To fairest lookes trust not too farre, nor yet to beautie braue:
For hateful thoughts so finely maskt, their deadly poisons haue.
Loues charmed cups, the subtile dame doth to her husband fill:
And causeth him with cruell hand, his childrens bloud to spill.²⁶

     The demonization of Roxolana continued in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English Senecan drama, which was chiefly concerned with matters of statecraft, rather than literary matters.²⁷ The Senecan tragedies, such as Gabriel Bounin’s La Sultane (1561) or Fulke Greville’s Mustapha (1609), focused on the dynastic ramifications of the Mustapha story and portrayed Roxolana as a ruthless political villain. In some ways, these plays demonized her more than early modern historical accounts. Largely based on Moffan’s account, Bounin’s La Sultane presented Rose (the name was also borrowed from Moffan) as a mastermind of the Mustapha intrigue, an ambitious sultana conducting a ruthless political scheme. Bounin stressed not only Rose’s excessive jealousy and boundless ambition, but also her use of the illegitimate means – sorcery, necromancy, and “les philtres d’amour” – for achieving her political goal. Such actions present a serious threat to the established political order. The play’s chorus, one of the central moralizing devices of the Senecan drama, repeatedly praises Mustapha’s virtues and condemns Rose’s cruelty by exclaiming, “Ceste Rose impudique!” and “Ceste Rose inhumaine!”²⁸
     Greville’s Mustapha, which was greatly influenced by Knolles’s Generall History of the Turkses, portrayed Rosa as utterly ruthless and deprived of any morality.  As she says in II.iii: “Vertue, nor vice shalll in themselues haue nothing.”²⁹ Greville’s Rosa stops at nothing to achieve her political goal – even at killing her own daughter, who sides with her step-brother Mustapha. At the root of the problem lies Rosa’s disobedience and greed for power: “O werisome obedience, I despise thee, /  . . .  E’re my delights or will shall stand in awe / Of God or Nature, common peoples lawe” (II.iii).³⁰ Such unruliness and passion are dangerous for the state’s order, says the play, because Rosa’s fury overthrows the laws of the empire, when someone stands in her way.
     Roxolana’s image received more psychological depth with the birth of the new genre of neoclassical tragedy in Italy. Prospero Bonarelli’s play, Il Solimano (1620), portrayed Roxolana (called “Regina” in the play), not as a villain and psychopath, but as a person with rational dynastic interests and ambition, and the one who is capable of intense emotional suffering.³¹ The plot against Mustapha is masterminded by the evil Rusten, Solimano’s general and son-in-law, who is jealous of the Prince’s military glory. Despite her participation in Rusten’s plot, Regina is more a victim of cruel fate and circumstances, rather than an instigator of the scheme. She is drawn into it only because she is motivated by a rational dynastic interest – to save her own son from fratricide and promote him to the throne. To deepen the heroine’s drama, Bonarelli introduced the “exchange of the babies” motif: Mustapha is really Regina’s lost son, who was substituted at the moment of birth. She discovers this fact too late, and the tragic effect is enhanced by her realization that her own intrigues caused the death of her son. Unable to deal with this terrible discovery, she kills herself.
     Bonarelli’s play represented a new aesthetic in the history of dramatic representations of the Roxolana Mustapha story. The neoclassical drama taught moral lessons and presented truth in its unchanged universal form, often turning characters into types.³² As part of the neoclassical aesthetic of universality, Il Solimano presented universal, timeless characteristics of human nature: human error and weakness, and human suffering from conflicting emotions. From this perspective, Roxolana’s actions were common follies of humanity, rather than heinous crimes of a villainous woman. While a typical queen, she was also a clearly-delineated, natural, and even sympathetic character. Although morality was an important part of the play’s message, it was not the harsh didacticism of the Senecan drama, with its chorus perpetually demonizing the Female Other.
     Il Solimano gave impetus to the development of the French classical tragedy, particularly in dealing with the “Oriental” and “Turkish” themes. Following Bonarelli, Jean de Mairet further developed the image of Roxolana as a powerful woman filled with strong emotions and capable of noble acts in his tragedy, Le Grand et Dernier Solyman ou la mort de Mustapha (1635). Although Mairet’s Roxelane is a schemer in the first three acts of the play, her maternal fear of fratricide is justifiable, and she becomes magnanimous in her suffering at the end.³³ The psychological complexity and popularity of the Roxolana figure in the seventeenth-century Italian and French classical drama had undoubtedly contributed to the change of her image in the western imagination. From a scheming, murdering machine of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historical accounts and Senecan plays, Roxolana was transformed into a truly tragic character, and the sensational nature of the Mustapha story was turned into a high tragedy of a great psychological depth, which contrasted favorably with the harsh didacticism of the earlier age.
     Another, much lighter, image of Roxolana was also developed by mid-seventeenth-century French drama – in the genre of tragicomedy. Charles Vion Dalibray’s tragicomedy Le Soliman (1637) followed Bonarelli’s plot until the last act, where he developed a happy resolution of the Mustapha conflict.³⁴ Jean Desmares’ tragicomedy Roxelane (1643) connected the Mustapha plot with the story of how Roxolana tricked Suleiman into marrying her.³⁵ While early modern historians used the latter anecdote to present Roxolana as a threat to the Ottoman state, Desmares used it to celebrate Roxelane’s intelligence and ambition.³⁶ The play ended with Soliman’s welcoming Roxelane to the throne as a legitimate co-ruler and declaring her children to be successors to the Empire. The happy resolutions of Dalibray’s and Desmares’ tragicomedies further revealed a shift in the French public’s perception of both Roxolana’s personality.
     The popular image of Roxolana started to change visibly by the late seventeenth century, when Europe began to develop a new attitude toward the Turks. After the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683 and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottoman Empire was no longer perceived as a menace, but rather as a regime in decline.³⁷ The West was now more interested in the sensuality and mystique of the Oriental seraglio than in Turkish atrocities or military prowess. Turkish themes moved from tragedies to comic operas and ballets.³⁸ The sultan’s harem was now perceived as a fascinating and tantalizing place – a place of romance, passion, and sexual jealousy, a place of the “immense sexual lust,” “boundless jouissance,” and the “despot’s endless copulation with an endless number of women.”³⁹ In literature, the seraglio fantasy found its most eloquent expression in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), probably the most influential harem narrative of the western world. In painting, this fantasy was reflected in the nineteenth-century obsession with the beautiful, languid, lily white bodies of European odalisques that were habitually placed at the very center of the sumptuous seraglio.⁴⁰
     As the West began to form its Asian harem fantasy, and as the “cruel Turk” image gave more room to the “amorous Turk” image, there also came a shift in the perception of Roxolana’s personality. Her early modern representation as a ruthless schemer was replaced with a much softer, more feminine and seductive, and yet intelligent image. The Mustapha story was abandoned in favor of the lighter episodes of Roxolana’s career, such as her romance and marriage with Suleiman. The story of Suleiman’s marriage and his long-time, monogamous devotion to Roxolana added more credit to her seductive and mental powers. That a former slave managed to subdue the invincible Oriental despot and virtually turn him into her own “love slave” imparted more mystique and sensuous appeal to her personality. Roxolana’s name gradually lost its Slavic flavor and acquired a more Western sound, as in Roxelana, Roxana, or simply the Sultana. Her birthplace shifted from Ruthenia to other European locales, such as Wallachia, France, Italy, and even Turkey.⁴¹
     By this time, Roxolana had been totally appropriated by the Italian and French drama, fiction, opera, and operetta. This is evident, for instance, in Jean Marmontel’s tale “Soliman II,” from his Contes moraux (1761). Here, the captive Roxalana, transformed by the author into a French woman, competes for the love of Soliman with two other European concubines, Elmira and Delia. The clever and feisty Roxalana wins the battle and becomes a sultana by selling Soliman the idea of personal freedom and by teaching him gallant manners of a French gentleman: “You are powerful, and I am pretty; so we are equal.”⁴² It is not her ruthlessness, but rather her free spirit, wit, and her “little turned-up nose” that ultimately overthrow the laws of the empire.
     Charles-Simon Favart turned Marmontel’s tale into a versified libretto for his comic opera Soliman II, ou Les Trois Sultanes (music by P.C. Gibert) in the same year, 1761. Favart’s musical comedy enjoyed such tremendous popularity, that it soon entailed numerous adaptations in English, German, Italian, and other European languages.⁴³ Interestingly, the comedy ended with a “Divertissement,” when all the odalisques and slaves of the seraglio came out to the stage to crown Roxelane and sing: “Vivir, Vivir Sultana; / Vivir, Vivir Roxelana.”⁴⁴ Roxelane’s marriage to Suleiman – a case of a woman’s law-breaking in the early modern age –  was now perceived by western audiences as a triumph of a woman’s wit and charm.
     In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art and literature, the legend of Roxolana continued to expand and magnify in proportions, often acquiring romantic overtones – a practice inherited from the West’s romantic fascination with Turkey and the Near East.⁴⁵ The circumstances of Roxolana’s origin were frequently altered to create an aura of mystery and magnanimity around her. Quasi-historical and fictional narratives portrayed her as the daughter of a Ukrainian bishop⁴⁶ or the Crimean khan,⁴⁷ and as an irresistibly alluring and ravishing beauty.
     However, while some modern novels presented Roxolana in a rather sympathetic light, ⁴⁸ the old negative image of her as a manipulative and ruthless schemer never entirely vanished. Formulaic statements, such as “she never forgave those who punished her,” and she was as “hard as the diamonds she mocked,”⁴⁹ occur frequently in many such works. Reiterating the commonplaces of early modern Ottoman and European historians, modern Western writers still hold Roxolana directly responsible for the Ottoman Empire’s demise, as is evident, for instance, from a chapter title in Fairfax Downey’s 1929 novel The Grande Turk: “How Suleyman Chose a New Favorite in His Harem to the Bane of His Empire.” More recently, Anthony Bridge, in his 1983 fictionalized biography of Suleiman the Magnificent, called Roxolana a “single-minded and ruthless woman,” who got rid of Mustafa mostly because she did not like competition. He claimed that the concentration of power in Roxolana’s hands was a “political fact which was destined to settle the fate of the Turkish Empire and to ensure its abrupt decline after Suleiman’s death.” Bridge then concludes, “Unluckily for Turkey, when Roxolana was determined to do something, she pursued her purpose with a relentlessness which knew no limits.”⁵⁰
     In conclusion, the evolution of the Roxolana image in European culture is a fascinating illustration of the history of western “Orientalism.” In this single female figure, one can trace the “domestication of the exotic”⁵¹> that Europe was conducting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concentration of several topical issues, such as the attitudes toward the Turks and toward women in power, in the historical and literary representations of Roxolana by European writers makes the latter a perfect material for reading and teaching the Other.

Endnotes

1. All three reports were published in Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, ed. Eugenio Alberi, ser. III, vols. I-III (Firenze [Florence], 1840-1855).
2. Luigi Bassano, Costumi et i modi particolari della vita de’ Turchi (Roma [Rome], 1545; ed. Franz Babinger, Munich, 1963).
3. I refer here to two English editions of Busbecq’s letters: The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. E.S. Forster (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927; 1968), based on the Latin Elzevir edition of 1633; and The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, eds. C. T. Forster and F.H.B. Daniell (London: Kegan, Paul, & Co., 1881; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971). The reason for using two different editions of Busbecq’s letters in this essay is that some of the passages I quote are not available in the more “modern,” yet abridged version of 1971.
4. Roxolana’s Russian origin was mentioned by the Venetian ambassadors Bragadino and Trevisano, as well as by Bassano, Busbecq, and other sixteenth-century sources. See Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato  I: 74; 115; Bassano cap. xv [44]. Samuel Twardowski, member of the Polish embassy to Suleiman’s court in the years of 1621-1622, claimed that Roxolana was the daughter of an Orthodox priest from Rohatyn, a small town in the Western Ukraine, not far from Lviv. See “Przewaźna legacya i.o. Krysztofa Zbaraskiego . . . do Najpotężniejszego sołtana cesarza tureckiego Mustafy, w roku 1621 . . .,” Poezye Samuela z Skrzypny Twardowskiego (Kraków: K.J. Turowski, 1861) 169. It must be noted that in the early modern period, the words Rus or Russian were applied to the territories formerly belonging to the Kievan Rus (that is, modern-day Ukraine), while present-day Russia was called The Duchy of Muscovy, or Muscovy Rus. The word Roxolania was often used in reference to Ukraine in early modern Europe. See Agathangel Krymsky, Istoria Turechyny (Kyiv [Kiev]: Akademia Nauk, 1924) 185. In a more specific sense, the word Roxolania referred to the province of Ruthenia (a.k.a. Red Russia) in the Western Ukraine.
5. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq 28. 
6. Costumi et i modi particolari della vita de’ Turchi cap. xv [44]. Translation mine.
7. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq 49.
8. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq 30-33.
9. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq 114.
10. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq 119-20.
11. Anthony Bridge, Suleiman the Magnificent: Scourge of Heaven (New York: Granada, 1983) 160; Geoffrey Goodwin, The Private World of Ottoman Women (London: Saqi Books, 1997) 124-25.
12. Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 90.
13. See Soltani Solymanni Tvrcarum Imperatoris, horrendum facinus, scelerato in proprium filium, natu maximum, Soltanum Mustapham, parricidio, anno domini 1553 patratum (Basileae [Basle], 1555).
14. References here are made to the English translation of Moffan’s pamphlet, which appeared as the thirty-fourth novella in William Painter, The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasures (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575) 395-432). See 403-04.
15. Painter 410-11.
16. Painter 401-02.
17. For various editions and translations of Moffan’s pamphlet into other European languages, see Carl Göllner, Tvrcica. Die europäischen Türkendrucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts,II. Band (Baden-Baden, 1968) 43 ff.
18. See Göllner 446, 605; Clarence Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature, 1520-1660 (Paris: Boivin, 1938) 221 n.1, 424 n.2.
19. Another tragic development at the Ottoman court, which is outside the scope of the present essay – the sudden fall from favor and subsequent execution of Suleiman’s bosom friend and Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Bassa, in 1534 – was linked to Roxolana’s intrigues by several early modern European historians and writers, despite the fact that no Ottoman historians or rumors ever implicated her in this story. Paolo Giovio first connected Ibrahim’s fall with Roxolana’s jealousy and interference into Ottoman state affairs, in his Historiarvm sui tempores (1552), and the idea was then repeated in several French chronicles, such as Laonicus Chalcondyle’s Histoire de la Decadence de l’Empire Grec, et Establissement de Celuy des Turcs (Thomas Artus; Paris, 1612) and Michel Baudier’s Inventaire de l’histoire generale des Turcs (Paris, 1617), as well as in an anonymous Latin play, Solymannidae Tragoedia, written at Oxford in 1581. In 1641, Madeleine de Scudéry turned the Ibrahim plot into a picaresque novel, Ibrahim ou l’Illustre Bassa, where Roxolana (Roxelane) was depicted, in the tradition of Giovio and Baudier, as an unscrupulous schemer and the mastermind of Ibrahim’s execution. This association was further solidified in two dramatic versions of M. Scudéry’s novel – one by her brother George Scudéry, in his tragicomedy, Ibrahim ou l’Illustre Bassa (1643), and the other, by a German playwright, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, in his Hochbarock tragedy, Ibrahim Bassa (1653).
20. Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London: Adam Islip, 1603) 759.
21. Paolo Giovio, A Short Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles, compyled by Paulus Jouius bishop of Nucerne, and dedicated to Charles the V Emperour. Drawen oute of the Italyen tong in to Latyne by Franciscus Niger Bassianates. And translated out of Latyne into english by Peter Ashton (London: E. Whitechurch, 1546) CXVv.
22. The Political Writings of John Knox, ed. Marvin A. Breslow (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985) 42.
23. Vitae et icones svltanorum Tvrcicorvm (Francfurt ad Moen [Frankfurt am Main], 1596) 206. Translation mine.
24. Knolles 757-71.
25. Knolles 757, 759.
26. Knolles 759.
27. Henry B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1946).
28. Gabriel Bounin, La Soltane; tragedie (Paris: G. Morel, 1561; ed. Michael Heath, University of Exeter, 1977) ll. 474, 480.
29. See Fulke Greville, The Tragedy of Mustapha (London: N. Butler, 1609) C2r. References are made to the first quarto edition of Greville’s play, which differs significantly from the revised folio version of 1633.
30. Greville Cv.
31. Prospero Bonarelli della Rovere, Il Solimano; tragedia (Firenze [Florence]: P. Cecconcelli, 1620).
32. John Allen, A History of the Theatre in Europe (London: Heinemann, 1983) 126.
33. References are made to a later edition of the play: Jean de Mairet, Le Grand et dernier Solyman ov La Mort de Mvstapha (Paris: Avgvstin Courbe, 1639).
34. Charles Vion Dalibray, Le Soliman; tragi-comedie (Paris: T. Quinet, 1637).
35. For the account of this story, see the discussion of Moffan above.
36. Jean Desmares, Roxelane; tragi-comedie (Paris: A. de Sommaville et A. Covrbé, 1643).
37. Alan Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1998) 20; Alexandrine St. Clair, The Image of the Turk in Europe (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973) 14.
38. On the popularity of Turkish themes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European music and opera, see Eve Meyer, “The Image of the Turk in European Performing Arts,” Süleymân the Second and His Time, eds. Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul: Isis, 1993) 249-56; Eve Meyer, “Turquerie and Eighteenth-Century Music,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 7.4 (Summer 1974): 474-88; and W. Daniel Wilson, “Turks on the Eighteenth-Century Operatic Stage and European Political, Military, and Cultural History,” Eighteenth-Century Life 2.9 (1985): 79-92.
39. Mladlen Dolar, introduction, The Sultan’s Court, by Alan Grosrichard xiii.
40. On the evolution of the harem fantasies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western art and literature, see Grosrichard; Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002); and Ruth Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
41. For Roxolana’s Italian origin, see Joseph von Hammer, Histoire de l’empire ottoman, vol. V (Paris, 1836) 487. Specifically, Hammer refers to Wagner’s Petit Livre sur les Turcs (1664), Ulric Wallich’s De religione Turcica, and Jean-François Neger’s Annales. On Roxolana’s Turkish origin, see The Lives and Amours of Queens and Royal Mistresses (London, 1727) 60.
42. References here are made to the English translation of Marmontel’s tale. See Marmontel’s Moral Tales, trans. George Saintsbury (London: George Allen, 1895) 10, 18.
43. Among such popular remakes of Favart’s musical comedy were a farce by Isaac Bickerstaff, The Sultan, or A Peep into the Seraglio (London: for C. Dilly, 1775), as well as operas by Joseph Martin Kraus, Soliman II (Stockholm, 1789) and Franz Xaver Süssmeyer, Soliman der Zweyte; oder Die drey Sultanninen (Wien [Vienna], 1799). For more information on this topic, see Alfred Iacuzzi, The European Vogue of Favart: The Diffusion of the Opéra-Comique (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1932).
44. Charles-Simon Favart, Soliman second, comedie en trois actes, en vers (Paris: J. Neaulme, 1762) 84.
45. “The close of the eighteenth century saw the end of the ‘turkomania’ in Europe and the rise in its place of a romantic involvement with the Near East. The Turk – former enemy of Christendom, scapegoat of the Reformation, inspiring derision of frivolous diversion – emerged in the nineteenth century as an object of longing, as Europe’s Romantics sought rebirth in the faraway lands of Rousseau’s virtuous natural man.” St. Clair 21-22.
46. Fairfax Downey, The Grande Turk: Suleyman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottomans (New York: Minton, Balch, & Co., 1929).
47. Johannes Tralow, Roxelane; Roman einer Kaiserin (Zürich: Scientia, 1944).
48. See, for instance, Aileen Crawley’s novels, The Bride of Suleiman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981) and The Shadow of God (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983).
49. Harold Lamb, Suleiman the Magnificent Sultan of the East (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951) 79.
50. Bridge 128-30.
51. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 60.