Women Slaves
Of all the people taken into Tatar and Turkish captivity, it was perhaps the women who had the best chance of a decent life. Almost all of them ended up as domestic servants or concubines of their Muslim masters and were treated as an integral part of the household.
Attractive young women were especially sought after by the Tatars, who apparently called them “white yasir” (bila cheliad in Ukrainian) - not because of their white skin (which, indeed, could sometimes be of a lighter shade than that of the average Tatar or Turk), but rather because of the white scarves that young Ukrainian women used to cover their hair.64 So valuable were attractive Ukrainian girls that Michael the Lithuanian exclaimed that in the slave market they were “worth nearly their weight in gold” and treated with care because of it.65Such women were widely sought after because Islamic law allowed a Muslim man not only up to four wives at the same time, but also the use, as concubines, of any slave women he could own and support. If such a woman bore her master a child and he recognized this, the child was considered free, and the master - though not Ottoman sultans - sometimes freed and married the mother as well. As we saw above, even if he did not marry her, the woman acquired the privileged status of “mother of child” (umm walad). She could not be sold, and became free on her master's death. Thus slave parentage on the mother's side bore little stigma in Islamic societies, and the children of such liaisons often rose high in Muslim society.66
The most famous of such Ukrainian female slaves is undoubtedly Rox- elana (Plate 8), the favourite, and subsequently the legal wife, of Suleiman the Magnificent, perhaps the greatest of all Ottoman sultans. Roxelana/ Hurrem (the cheerful one) was born seemingly in or near Rohatyn in Red Rus' (or “Red Ruthenia,” today in western Ukraine), probably the daughter of a Ukrainian Orthodox priest.
She was captured by the Tatars on one of their raids and sold into Turkish slavery. She entered Suleiman's harem about 1520, when he became sultan, and was soon influencing affairs of state. The execution of Suleiman's good friend the Grand Vizier Ibrahim (1536) and of his own favourite elder son, Mustafa (1553), are both ascribed to her, probably because they both kept her own sons from the throne. She seems to have influenced Suleiman's foreign policy towards friendship with Poland-Lithuania, and her correspondence with the king of Poland and with the wife of Shah Tahmasp of Persia has been preserved. Roxelana became a pious Muslim, although for her, as for Suleiman, fanaticism of any kind seems to have been alien. Never forgetting her origins, she had a mosque built near the female slave market in Istanbul. One of her sons, Selim, eventually succeeded his father as ruler.67There were, of course, many other Ukrainian women who entered the harems of the Ottoman sultans. Besides Suleiman, Osman II (reigned 161822), Ibrahim (reigned 1640-48), and Mustafa II (reigned 1695-1703) all had either Ukrainian or Russian consorts, and the mothers of both Mehmed IV (reigned 1648-87) and Osman III (reigned 1754-57) were both Ukrainian. The last was known especially for her virtue, wisdom, modesty, and piety.68 However, none of these women ever attained the power, prestige, and European renown of Roxelana.
The careers of female slaves such as Roxelana touched the Ukrainian folk tradition. One of the best-known dumy about Turkish captivity deals with a female Ukrainian slave named Marusia, a priest's daughter from Bohuslav in Kyiv province, who “turned Turk.” She told some Cossack captives (in bondage for some thirty years) that it was Eastertide back home. They cursed her for this tantalizing news, but when their Turkish master went out, she kept his keys and freed the captives. In parting with the Cossacks, however, she bade them not ask her parents to ransom her, for she has “turned Turk and become a Muslim”: “Because of the Turkish luxury I need, / And because of that miserable thing called greed.”69 This is again the viewpoint of the Christian homeland, but it does reveal awareness of the predicament and opportunities of many of the young female slaves.