Hürrem Sultan (Turkish pronunciation: [hyɾˈɾæm suɫˈtan]; Ottoman Turkish: خرّم سلطان; c. 1505 – 15 April 1558), also known as Roxelana, was the chief consort and legal wife of Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, mother of his successor Selim II, and the first haseki sultan of the Ottoman Empire. She became one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history, and the first in a series of prominent women who lived during the period that came to be known as the Sultanate of Women. She is commonly considered the most powerful Haseki Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Presumably born in Ruthenia to a Ruthenian Orthodox family, she was captured by Crimean Tatars during a slave raid and eventually taken via the Crimean trade to Constantinople, the Ottoman capital.
She entered the imperial harem, rose through the ranks and became the favorite concubine of Sultan Suleiman. Breaking Ottoman tradition, he unprecedentedly freed and married Hürrem, making her his legal wife. Sultans had previously married only foreign freeborn noblewomen, if at all, and even then they usually reproduced through slave concubines. She remained in the sultan's court for the rest of her life, enjoying an extremely loving and intimate relationship with her husband, and having at least six children with him, including the future sultan, Selim II, which makes her an ancestor of all the following sultans and present descendants of the Ottoman dynasty. Of Hürrem's six known children, five were male, breaking one of the oldest Ottoman customs according to which each concubine could only give the sultan one male child, to maintain a balance of power between the various women. However, not only did Hürrem bear more children to the sultan after the birth of her first son in 1521, but she was also the mother of all of Suleiman's children born after her entry in the harem at the very beginning of his reign.
Hürrem eventually wielded enormous power, influencing and playing a central role in the politics of the Ottoman Empire. The correspondence between Suleiman and Hürrem, unavailable until the nineteenth century, along with Suleiman's own diaries, confirms her status as the Sultan's most trusted confidant and adviser. During his frequent absences, the pair exchanged passionate love letters. Hürrem included political information and warned of potential uprisings. She also played an active role in the affairs of the empire and even intervened in affairs between the empire and her former home, apparently helping Poland attain its privileged diplomatic status. She supposedly brought a "feminine touch" to diplomatic relations, sending diplomatic letters accompanied by personally embroidered articles to foreign leaders and their relatives. Two of these notable contemporaries were Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and Mahinbanu Sultan, the favorite sister and intimate counselor of Tahmasp I, who exchanged official letters with Hürrem as well as with an Ottoman imperial princess who was probably Mihrimah Sultan, daughter of Hürrem and Suleiman.
Hürrem patronized major public works (including the Haseki Sultan Complex and the Hürrem Sultan Hamam). She died in April 1558, in Constantinople and was buried in an elegant and beautifully adorned mausoleum adjacent to the site where her husband would join her eight years later in another mausoleum within the grand Süleymaniye Mosque complex in Istanbul.
Leslie P. Peirce has written that her birth name may have been either Aleksandra or Anastazja Lisowska, but this is disputed. Primary sources of the 16th century do not record the premarital name and surname of Hürrem Sultan. In Polish tradition, her name was Alexandra, and in Ukrainian, she was called Anastasia. American researcher Galina Yermolenko suggests that the name Anastasia (or Nastya) had arisen in literature under the influence of folklore and, referring to Mykhailo Orlich, cites a Bukovinian folk song derived from Mauritius Goslavsky's poem "Podilla" (1827). It is not known how original those stories are and whether they date back to before 1880, when the name Anastasia Lisovska first appeared in Mykhailo Orlovsky's Roksolana or Anastasia Lisovskaya. Her father's supposed name — Gavrylo Lisovsky — first appeared in works of fiction as well.
In European reports and accounts, Hürrem was always referred to as Rossa, Rosselana, Roxelana, Roxolana, or Roksolana (the latter two are also transliterations from Ukrainian: Роксолана). This name was first used by the Holy Roman Empire ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in his compendium Turkish Letters (published in 1581 under the name Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum).
Among the Ottomans, she was known mainly as Haseki Hürrem Sultan or Hürrem Haseki Sultan. Hürrem or Khurrem (خرم) means "the joyful and endearing one" in Persian. However, "Hürrem" was most likely not her first Ottoman name, especially as Suleiman is said to have named her himself. In the naming rite that masters arrogated to themselves, male and female owners often played the poet. They chose to confer — to impose — on their female slaves the names of flowers, precious stones, and other pleasures of life. For imperial concubines, endless variations of "rose", "grace", and "delicacy" were always in vogue. Hürrem must have acquired such a name upon her acceptance of Islam before she entered the imperial harem and became Suleiman's new concubine, but this name, if it existed, remains lost to history.
While no documentation exists about Hürrem's life before she entered the harem, legends about her origins arose in literary works. It has been claimed that she was of Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish, origin.
Many sources state that Hürrem came from Ruthenia, which was then part of the Polish Crown. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq called her "Roxelana" based on her supposed origin from the Ruthenian territory in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the time often known as Roxolania (from the Roxolani people mentioned by Strabo as inhabitants of the northern Black Sea region). Samuel Twardowski in his poem "The Great Embassy" (written between 1621 and 1623, published in 1633) noted that her father was an Orthodox priest from Rohatyn (now a city in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine). Michalo Lituanus, former ambassador of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Crimean Khanate in the mid-16th century, wrote that "the wife of the present Turkish emperor who loves her dearly — mother of his primogenital [first] son who will govern after him, was kidnapped from our land".
The Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero called Hürrem "[donna] … di nazione russa". Another Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Battista Trevisano, called her "Sultana, ch'è di Rusi". The Venetian military leader Marco Antonio Bragadin also called Hürrem "donna di nazione russa". The belief that Hürrem was of Russian rather than Ukrainian origin may have resulted from the eventual misinterpretation of the words Rosselana and Rossa.
During the reign of Selim I, sometime between 1512 and 1520, the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate kidnapped her during one of their slave raids in Eastern Europe. The Tatars may have first taken her to the Crimean city of Kaffa, a major centre of the Ottoman slave trade, before she was taken to Constantinople.
According to Kutbeddin el-Mekki, an envoy of the sharif of Mecca, and the memoirs of Shaykh Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, a Meccan religious figure who visited Constantinople in 1558, she had been a servant in the household of Hançerli Hanzade Fatma Zeynep Sultan, daughter of Şehzade Mahmud and granddaughter of Sultan Bayezid II, who gifted her to Suleiman when he rose to the throne.
Hürrem Sultan likely entered the harem around fifteen years of age. The precise year that she entered the harem is not recorded, but it's accepted that she became Suleiman's new favourite concubine around the time he became the sultan in 1520, because their first child was born in 1521.
Hürrem's unprecedented rise from a harem slave to Suleiman's legal wife attracted immense jealousy, acrimony and disfavor not only in the harem, but also from the general populace. By the early 1520s, she had become Suleiman's most prominent consort beside Mahidevran Hatun (c.1500), who was the mother of Suleiman's eldest surviving son. Before devoting himself exclusively to Hürrem and becoming monogamous, Suleiman had followed the precedent of his ancestors and taken a number of concubines when he was a prince but after becoming the sultan, he fell deeply in love with his new concubine, Hürrem.