Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire by Leslie Peirce (review)

In Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire, Leslie Peirce narrates the life of Roxolana (Roxelana, in the French spelling), consort of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66). Peirce traces the three stages of Roxelana’s career in the imperial harem: from a slave to the sultan’s favorite (haseki) (“Beginnings,” chapters 2–5), to a highly competitive concubine (“Challenges,” chapters 6–10), and to the imperial consort and de facto queen of the Ottoman Empire (“Politics,” chapters 11–15). Chapter One recapitulates major landmarks of Roxelana’s life, while the epilogue follows the fates of her family members and the ways in which her legacy survived into the later ages.

Peirce’s book is not the first nonfictional rendition of Roxelana’s biography, but it is the longest and most imaginative thus far. The main challenge in recreating the sultana’s life has been the scarcity of firsthand evidence: occasional mentions in the official harem records, annals, and histories, which followed the common Ottoman practice of disregarding women; several documents pertaining to her architectural projects; and a handful of her extant letters. To compensate for the episodic archival materials, Peirce relies on her vast knowledge of Ottoman history, as well as on sixteenth-century European travel accounts and diplomatic reports, to paint the milieu in which the sultan’s favorite was living. The author frequently reconstructs Roxelana’s life around the well-recorded official events, guessing how she would act in those circumstances.

The imaginative method of narration dominates the first ten chapters of the book, covering the obscure period of Roxelana’s life—from her appearance in the harem ca. 1520 up to her marriage to Suleyman in 1534. The elaborate descriptions of the imperial harems, Eskisarai and Topkapi, enable readers vividly to imagine Roxelana’s life on a daily basis. The harems are portrayed with microscopic precision, down to the finest details of their courts, chambers, offices, palaces, residential quarters, gates, and kitchens. One can even visualize the Istanbul landscape—the mosques, columns, and obelisks of the Hippodrome; the markets and public baths—that Roxelana would see from her veiled carriage when outside the royal palaces.

In addition to describing every prominent place, building, ritual, and figure of sixteenth-century Ottoman life, Peirce embellishes her account with frequent forays into earlier Ottoman history and contemporaneous royal courts of Europe. While numerous references to the preceding sultans’ reigns highlight Suleyman’s character and the old dynastic traditions that he broke for the benefit of his favorite, parallels to European courts and rulers, which are meant to reveal common patterns and problems of that age, are often nonessential. Intriguing as they may be, ubiquitous historical references—along with other digressions, backtrackings, and repetitions—tend to interrupt the chronological progression of the book and shift focus away from Roxelana. For instance, Chapter Nine mostly discusses Suleyman’s relationship with his bosom friend and grand vizier, Ibrahim, whom he suddenly had executed in March 1536. Several pages (166–68) are devoted to the discussion of the “age of the favorites” in Europe and the “flamboyant intimacy” of Henry VIII of England, Charles V, and Alexander the Great with their male favorites. Yet, these analogies hardly apply to Suleyman and Ibrahim, as Peirce herself convincingly argues that the sudden fallout between the friends occurred because, by 1536, Ibrahim had become an obstacle for the sultan’s turn from military exploits to state building. Continuous associative sidetracking like this may be the reason why Chapter One was needed to tie the eclectic narrative to the “Empress of the East.”

The last third of the book, dealing with Roxelana’s public career, after her marriage to Suleyman in 1534 and up to her death in 1558, is more rooted in hard evidence, as this...