Huraim Sultan: The Ukrainian princess who became the world’s most powerful woman

A towering bronze statue of a woman stands on a 15-foot-tall pillar in a park in Rohatyn, a town of 9,000 in western Ukraine. If you ask a local resident whose statue it is, they will tell you the name ‘Roksolana’.

In Ukraine she is also known as ‘Nastya Lesivska’, but in the rest of the world she is known as Horim Sultan, the powerful queen of Osman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. (It should be noted that in our country they are usually called or written Horim, but the real name is Khurram, which means happy)

What is a statue of Horim Sultan doing in a Ukrainian town?

Because according to most historians she was born here around 1502.

Suleiman the Magnificent ruled from 1520 to 1566 and his reign is considered the golden age of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, not only the Ottoman Empire achieved unparalleled success in the field of war, but various fields of culture, sciences, arts and architecture also got immense development.

From the washerman’s house to the approval of the Sultan

The Europeans call Horim Sultan Roxulana, which means ‘girl of Roxulania.’ Roxulania is nothing but the Latin name of the same Ukraine where the war is raging today.

Although there is no concrete historical evidence, tradition says that Hurrem Sultan was born in western Ukraine around 1505 and was abducted at the age of 15 by Crimean slave traders and sold in Istanbul.

Ibrahim Pasha, the prime minister of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, who was also a childhood friend of Suleiman, bought Roxulana and presented him as a concubine.

What happened after that is depicted in stories and movies, but rarely happens in real life. Since the number of the prince’s concubines was innumerable, an ordinary ‘peasant’ girl had no special status in this crowd, so Roksolana was assigned to the laundry service at the palace.

According to a tradition, the young prince was passing through the palace one night when he heard the sound of someone singing a song. There was so much sweetness in the voice and so much pain in the words that it gripped the young prince’s feet.

Solomon’s biographer Harold Lamb writes that the prince, who knew a little Russian (Ukrainian and Russian are similar languages), asked Roksolana what she was singing. It seems that in this short conversation, Roxulana won the prince’s heart with her intelligence, poise, and conversational eloquence.

Intelligence and elegance are emphasized because history is not very fond of Roksolana’s looks and facial features. For example, the Venetian ambassador Pietro Brigdin wrote that Roxolana was ‘young, but not very beautiful, but she had a certain dignity and was thin.’

It should not be surprising if one’s mind goes to Qalopatra, a famous figure in history, because the famous historian Plutarch wrote about Qalopatra that ‘her beauty was not so great as to leave a deep impression on the beholder. ‘ Going further, Plutarch writes that her personality impressed the viewers more than her physical beauty. But despite this, the impact that Qaluptra left on history is known to all.

This first meeting had such an effect on the prince that he placed his handkerchief on Roksolana’s shoulder. This meant in the language of the court that Roxulana, now being approved by the prince, rose from the status of a simple servant to the great presence of the ‘mother of the sultan’ and the queen of Mah Duran, Suleiman’s eldest son Mustafa, throughout the Ottoman Empire. She has come third after her mother. Roksolana was now named ‘Horeem Sultan’ meaning the one who pleases the Sultan.

Now you will fight me?

Obviously, Mahduran did not like this turn of events. We get a description of it in the words of another Venetian ambassador, Bernardo Navaggero. He went to Istanbul with an embassy in 1526. Recounting the events he heard and saw there, he writes that Mah Duran roared at Huraym Sultan and said, ‘Traitor, Bakao Gosh (i.e. that which was sold in the market), now will you fight me? ‘

Saying this, Mah Duran scratched the face of Huraym Sultan with his fingernails. After this incident, the Sultan called Huraym Sultan and he said that I am not able to appear before the Sultan at that time. The sultan insisted on seeing Huraym Sultan then found out what the queen had done to him.

The sultan sent a ‘notice of explanation’ to Mah Duran, and the hot-tempered queen said, ‘What I have done to her, she deserved more.’

But the reverse of this incident harmed Mah Duran and the status of Roksolana in the Sultan’s heart increased. Apart from Mah Duran, the Sultan had other wives, but they made Hureem Sultan the ‘Khaski Sultan’, meaning the Sultan’s special queen. What was the place of Huraym Sultan in Sultan’s heart, guess from one of Sultan’s poems:

My bright moon, my water life, my paradise.
I am a welcomer at your door
I always read your poems
I am a lover of a sad heart, a ‘lover’ of tearful eyes
I am happy and full.

It should be remembered that Sultan was also a poet and ‘Mahbi’ was his pen name.

Hurraym Sultan soon became the most powerful woman not only in the palace of Suleiman the Magnificent, not only in the history of the Ottoman Empire, but in all of Islamic history. First, the Sultan’s mother (interestingly, she was also from Crimea) died, and then when Prince Mustafa was made the governor of a province, according to the constitution of the time, her sons left during the month and so on. Hurrem Sultan became the mistress of black and white in Topkapi Mahal.

Ukraine and the Ottoman Empire

The rest of the story of Hurrem Sultan can be seen in the play ‘My Sultan’, here we try to explain a little bit more about the Ottoman Empire from Ukraine, besides Hurrem Sultan.

The fact is that the relationship between the Turks and Ukraine is older and deeper.

This connection begins with the conquests of Batu Khan, the grandson of Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. By the 1230s, Batu Khan had conquered much of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine and Russia, and had even conquered Moscow in the winter. This is something that Hitler could not do.

Well, Moscow was a small rural town at that time, so the Tatars in Batu Khan’s army did not show interest in it, but chose a city for themselves as their capital, which they named Qurum.

This Crimea was later called Crimea and it is the same province that was annexed by Russia in 2014.

In the 13th century, the Crimean Tatars converted to Islam. After the conquest of the region by Timur Ling, the whole region fell into chaos, finally a Tatar warlord named Malik Khaji Karai raised his flag over the Crimea and established a government that lasted for exactly three hundred years. This government is called ‘Khanat Crimea’ (Crimean Khanate). ‘Khanat’ means kingdom and is related to the word ‘Khan’ meaning chief.

Haji Karai’s shrine is located in Baghecha Saray, Crimea. This garden inn was the capital of the Karai dynasty for a long time.

In 1475, Haji Karai’s son Mankali Karai was arrested and brought before the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II and was willing to make the Khanate of Crimea a tributary of the Ottoman Empire.

With the support of the Ottomans, Menkli crushed his rivals while his son defeated a Russian army near Moscow, forcing the Russians to pay tribute.

The relationship between the Khanate of Crimea and the Ottoman Empire grew stronger in the following decades. The chiefs of Crimea had the advantage that they had the blessing of the superpower of the time in the form of the Ottomans, which prevented the surrounding countries from looking askance at them, while the Ottomans in the form of the Khanate were in the sea. Aswad had the facility to establish his dominance over this important area.

Apart from this, the Ottomans were regularly supplied with fresh troops of cavalry from the Khanate region to participate in the ongoing wars.

Moreover, the Khanate chiefs were also involved in the business of capturing large-scale slaves from the surrounding areas and selling them to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. According to a research report, from 1500 to 1700 they traded around 2 million slaves and concubines.

One such concubine was Horim Sultan, who was captured from the adjacent Crimean region, which was then part of Poland.

The slave trade

In fact, this entire region of Eastern Europe has been famous for the slave trade. So the English word slave is actually derived from Slav which was nothing but the people living in Ukraine and its surrounding region. This trend has been going on since the Roman and Byzantine times, which may be the reason that the men of this region used to be strong and the women were beautiful, so they were in high demand in the slave markets of Europe and Asia. That’s why the name of the slaves became slave.

Crimea was not directly included in the Ottoman Empire, but militarily, economically and politically it can be considered part of the Ottoman world.

This series of subjugation and obedience to the Russians continued until 1774. But after that, the power of the Russian Tsar continued to grow with each passing year and eventually the armies of the Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great conquered Crimea in 1783 and made it part of the Russian Empire.

After the revolution of 1917, Crimea also became part of the Soviet Union. After World War II, Stalin launched a large-scale reprisal against the Crimean Tatars under the suspicion that they had supported Hitler. Thousands of families were evicted from their homes and sent to Uzbekistan, some killed on the way, others on arrival in Uzbekistan. According to some reports, 40 percent of exiled families died within two years.

Stalin did not stop there but also tried to erase all traces of them from Crimea. Mosques and cemeteries were destroyed, old palaces and forts were destroyed, even the old names of regions and cities were changed. So, an attempt was made to change the name of the Baghecha Sarai, the capital of the Crimean Khanate, to ‘Pushkaninsk’, but it was not successful. Pushkin’s name because the great Russian poet wrote a long romantic poem based on this garden inn, which is considered one of the masterpieces of Russian literature.

But Ottoman influence over Ukraine was not limited to the Crimea. Many other regions of eastern Ukraine were also under their control, and the Ottomans even ruled parts of Ukraine directly.

In 1672, the Ottoman army led by Sultan Muhammad IV conquered Podolia and annexed it to the Ottoman Empire. This area was ruled by the King of Poland. The Ottomans made Podolia their ‘province’, meaning a province. The state used to be the central administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire.

However, in 1699, the Ottomans returned Podolia to Poland under a treaty.

Not only militarily, the Turks also left a cultural and linguistic impact on Ukraine, and the influence of the Turkish language can still be found in the Ukrainian language today. For example, in Ukrainian the shepherd is called ‘Choban’, which comes from the Turkish language. Similarly, kalam (carpet), kavan (melon), harboz (watermelon), and many other similar words come from Turkish.

Also, you may have heard the word ‘Maidan’ in many cities during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the same as Maidan in Urdu, but it means square in Turkish, and in the same sense it is used in Ukraine.

An example of these squares is the historic ‘Euro-Maidan’ in the capital city of Kiev, Ukraine, where not only the movement for independent Ukraine began in 1990, but also the center of the 2014 ‘Orange Revolution’.

Today, the same Horrem Sultan’s Ukraine is under Russian aggression, and Turkey is increasingly opposing it. Turkey has also provided Ukraine with combat drones that can be used against Russia. The reason is that the historical relations are far-reaching and deep.