A poetess is not such an anomaly in the harem as it is in the West. Indeed, most of the new poems Esmikhan had ever heard had, naturally enough, been written and published within the harem. The writer’s sex did not impress her as much as it did me.
But she, too, seemed grateful for the distraction and jumped at it. “Please do.”
I did:
“I am safe now.
But I remember the danger
When through your eyes
And handsome face
Love held out to me
His burning torch.
And intent on wounding me
In a thousand ways
He had gathered the flames of my fire
Even from the river of your eloquence...”
I faltered, remembering too late why the verse had had an impact. But the little hand in mine gave me a squeeze, lent me courage to go on.
“I transform my mad love
Into friendship now
And, thinking of your immeasurable gifts,
I reshape my soul to emulate you.”
And cool friendship eased the carriage’s jarring way.
LXIII
Nur Banu died without seeing another snowstorm, on Wednesday, the twenty-second day of Dhu’l Ka’da, the seventh of December in the year of our Lord 1583. Her son Murad put on black in mourning, the first time a sultan had ever done such a thing for his mother. Guilt makes people—even sultans—do unusual things.
Murad helped to carry the bier as well, out of the garden palace and through the twisting streets to the mausoleum at Aya Sophia. Here Nur Banu would rest eternally next to her lord Selim and the five little princes who had died in order to raise her son to the throne.
None of the deceased’s new dresses went with her: One goes naked to the grave in Islam. Over the simple shroud of seamless white silk rested Nur Banu’s headscarf, a few favorite hair ornaments, the braids of silk she had added to eke out her own hair as it had thinned towards the end. That was all. And she was gone.
Now Safiye was alone in her kingdom.
On the surface, this seemed not so bad. Miraculously, the sudden deaths of little princes stopped. The household multiplied at a rate unprecedented—Murad even became a father twice in a single night. The most serious conflicts were over whose infant should rock in the hammered-gold, jewel-encrusted cradle of the Ottomans. And Safiye’s word never failed to settle the matter.
So sure of her power was Baffo’s daughter now that she said nothing when Muhammed was called away from under her wing to begin his training to rule in the sandjak of Magnesia. She saw him settled with a sweet, beautiful, malleable little Greek girl and then kissed him quickly good-bye. The Kira was waiting, Ghazanfer Agha was waiting. There was business to attend to, and only time and Allah would bring the fullness of her power as Queen Mother to fruition.
Yet these eleven years as favorite and Mother of the Heir were Safiye’s most powerful. Now that there was peace in the harem—the peace of tyranny—she could turn her full attentions elsewhere.
Safiye and England’s Elizabeth wrote one another as “dear sister majesty.” Elizabeth followed the gift of the carriage with a magnificent thousand-pipe organ. Safiye herself did not care for the instrument. It reminded her a little too much of the sound that pervaded the convent gardens every Sunday, that most oppressive of days in her childhood week. But it was such a novelty and obviously such a fine piece of craftsmanship that, like a rare cabinet or rug, it was allowed in the harem on those merits alone. And one or two of the girls, not the most musical, but the most fun-loving, were allowed to take lessons from the installers. They learned a few simple-minded hymns which they insisted on playing over and over again. When more accomplished musicians tried their hands at it, they found that the one-key-one-solid-note system hampered their usually elaborate Eastern modulations and trills. Eventually the organ was forgotten and gathered dust—like nothing more than a very large and empty inlaid chest.
Safiye was gracious enough, however, to return gift for gift. Exquisite jewels and fabrics were sent off to that distant island and something Elizabeth craved even more was arranged there on the shores of the Golden Horn—trading privileges which equaled or excelled those of any other Christian nation.
Safiye corresponded with most other sovereigns of the East and West at one time or another as it suited her needs. But since they were all men, to those in the East she went through the harems, whose power she trusted more anyway. The West frustrated her, and she spent hours agonizing over the powerlessness of a woman in those countries, not even excluding Catherine and Elizabeth. Any communication she undertook with those princes had to be through agents. Fortunately, they were usually servants of the Grand Viziers who, with Sokolli gone, more and more came to be her own creatures, picked, groomed, and elevated to this office by her own hand.
Under Safiye, the realm of the Ottomans reached greater extent than it had had even under Murad’s grandfather, the great Suleiman. Successful expeditions pushed into Moldavia, Poland, the Crimea, Daghistan, Transcaucasia, Georgia, Persia. There were setbacks—rebellions in Egypt and Syria—as there must be when the head of power is unable to move swiftly to trouble spots on her own. Her agents moved quickly and decisively enough, however.
The Druses in their mountain fastness, for example, were put down—with unparalleled severity, I understand—by Safiye’s Ibrahim Pasha. Though until the matter found its way into the memoirs of retired soldiers, we, safe in Constantinople, safe in the harem, knew nothing of it.
Closer to home, the janissaries rebelled in April 1589, the spahis three years later. We did know of that: No one could escape the clatter of their overturned cooking pots and rattling weapons, the choking smoke of their campfires turned to torches and firebrands and arson, the threatening growl of their hunger up through the Third Court to the very
