“The conjunction of these two events in the spring of 1534—Hafsa’s demise and Suleyman’s urgent need to go east—is the most likely explanation for the timing of the marriage. Several factors were apparently at play, the most obvious being that Hafsa’s death made wedding Roxelana feasible. Elevating a concubine through marriage would have dishonored the queen mother by diminishing her well-deserved and hard-earned status as the ranking female of the Ottoman dynasty. Hafsa was the family elder, the only person in whose presence her son was said to rise to his feet. Nor was the marriage likely to happen while Mahidevran still lived in the Old Palace, but that issue had resolved itself a year earlier. There were other pressing reasons for securing Roxelana’s status. As always, when grand vizier and sultan were both absent, a loyal and dependable deputy governor was assigned to administer and supervise Istanbul. But with his mother gone, his confidant Ibrahim on the frontier, and his only adult son assigned to monitor all Anatolia, Suleyman was in want of a trusted intimate in the capital.
[…] Passion and politics inevitably intertwined Roxelana and Suleyman’s lives. While strategic considerations certainly played a role in their decision to marry, personal feelings were undoubtedly at work as well. It had long been obvious that Roxelana was more than an ordinary childbearing slave of the dynasty. Her career as the sultan’s favorite was unique in the history of the Ottoman dynasty, or at least in contemporary memory. Suleyman had broken several precedents for his favorite, and he had certainly not hidden his devotion to her. What the marriage accomplished was to legitimate this concubine’s maverick position as the mother of all the children of Suleyman’s sultanate and to imbue her stature with an aura of majesty.
[…] The royal wedding apparently caught some in the foreign community by surprise. “This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans,” remarked the Istanbul representative of the Genoese Bank of Saint George. “The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia.… There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.” If the palace anticipated negative reaction to the event, it offered palliative diversion. “At night the principal streets are gaily illuminated, and there is much music and feasting,” noted the banker’s dispatch. “The houses are festooned with garlands and there are everywhere swings in which people swing by the hour with great enjoyment.”
The public festivities highlighted entertainment just as the memorable circumcision celebration of six years before had. Although the 1530 event’s duration and extravagance were greater, the venue was the same, as was, at least in part, the menu of amusements. This time, however, Roxelana was a center of attraction. “In the old Hippodrome a great tribune is set up, the place reserved for the Empress and her ladies screened with a gilt lattice,” wrote the Genoese banker. “Here Roxelana and the Court attended a great tournament in which both Christian and Muslim Knights were engaged, and tumblers and jugglers and a procession of wild beasts.” The giraffes had necks so long that to the unaccustomed spectator they appeared to “touch the sky.” The wedding prepared the way for Roxelana’s public career. Soon she would begin the construction of a philanthropic foundation in Istanbul, the first royal mother to build in the Ottoman capital.” – Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire
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