An enslaved woman from Ruthenia who became the freed, legally married wife of Suleiman the Magnificent at the height of the Ottoman Empire — she broke two long-standing customs of the dynasty, helped open the era later called the Sultanate of Women, corresponded with foreign kings, and funded major public works in Istanbul, while a hostile contemporary and Western tradition reduced her to a scheming concubine.
She arrived in Istanbul as a captive, sold into the household of one of the most powerful rulers in the world. By Ottoman custom, a sultan's mother held rank; by long custom, a sultan's consort bore one son and then devoted herself to that prince. Hurrem did neither. The sultan freed her, married her in a public ceremony no Ottoman ruler had held for generations, and made her his central and lasting consort for decades. Foreign ambassadors who watched her rise could not explain it, so they reached for the words they had: witch, sorceress, the woman who bewitched a great king. The Ottomans, watching the same thing, gave her a name that meant 'the joyful one.'