This is a specimen of Turkish superstition. With them it is a fearful offence for a man to sit, even unwittingly, on the Koran (which is their Bible); in the case of a Christian the punishment is death. Moreover, they do not allow rose-leaves to lie on the ground, because they think that the rose sprang from the sweat of Mahomet, just as the ancients believed that it came from the blood of Venus. But I must leave off, or I shall tire you with these trifling matters.
I arrived at Constantinople on January 20, and there I found the colleagues I mentioned above, Antony Wranczy and Francis Zay. The Sultan was away in Asia with the Turkish army, and no one was left at Constantinople except the eunuch Ibrahim Pasha, governor of the city, and Roostem, who had been deprived of his office. Nevertheless, we visited the ex-chief-Vizier, showed him every courtesy, and gave him presents to mark our esteem; for we did not forget the great influence he once had, and his prospect of shortly regaining it.
Now that I am speaking of Roostem, I may as well tell you how he came to be deprived of his high office. Solyman had a son by a concubine, who came from the Crimea, if I remember rightly. His name was Mustapha, and at the time of which I am speaking he was young, vigorous, and of high repute as a soldier. But Solyman had also several other children by a Russian woman (Roxolana).[111] To the latter he was so much attached that he placed her in the position of a wife, and assigned her a dowry, the giving and receiving of which constitutes a marriage amongst the Turks. In taking her as his wife, he broke through the custom of his later predecessors on the throne, none of whom, since the days of Bajazet the elder, had a lawful wife. For of all the indignities which the vanquished Sultan endured, when he and his wife fell into the hands of Tamerlane,[112] nothing seemed more dreadful than the insults which his wife received before his eyes. His humiliation made so deep an impression on his successors that, up to the time of Solyman, they abstained from contracting a legal marriage with any woman, by way of insuring themselves, under all circumstances, against a similar misfortune. The mothers of their children were women in the position of slaves, the idea being that, if they were insulted, the disgrace to the Sultan would not be so great as in the case of a lawful wife. You must not be surprised at this, for the Turks do not consider the position of the children of concubines and mistresses inferior to that of the offspring of wives; both have precisely the same rights of inheritance to their father’s property.