Roxolana’s precipitous career from a harem slave to the queen of the Ottoman Empire made her particularly fascinating, yet vulnerable to the judgment of many a historian and writer. Kidnapped from the Ukraine and sold into the Ottoman imperial harem in the early sixteenth century, Roxolana quickly became the favorite concubine ( haseki ) of Sultan Suleiman I, the Magnificent (1520– 1566), and later, his beloved wife, the powerful sultana. In the course of their four-decade-long romance until…
