Mihrimah Sultana
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Princess Mihrimah Sultana (1522 – 1578) was a daughter of Sultan Suleiman I, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, and his fourth wife, Aleksandra Lisowska, a Ukrainian woman better known as Roxelana or Karima, the name she was given upon her marriage. Princess Mihrimar's name is also spelled Mirhumah or Mihri-a-Mah.
Mihrimah traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire with her father as he surveyed the lands and conquered new ones. It is written in Persian literature that she traveled into battle with her father on an Arabian stallion called Batal at the Battle of Gizabar in northern Egypt outside Alexandria.
In 1539, at the age of seventeen, she was married off to Damad Rustam Pasha (1505–1561), the Grand Vizier under Suleiman. Though the union was unhappy, Mihrimah flourished as a patroness of the arts and continued her travels with her father until her husband's death.
The fact that Mihrimah encouraged her father to launch the campaign against Malta, promising to build 400 galleys at her own expense; that like her mother she wrote letters to Sigismund II the King of Poland; and that on her father's death she lent 50,000 gold sovereigns to her brother Sultan Selim to meet his immediate needs, illustrate the political power which she wielded.
She was not only a princess, but functioned as valide sultan (equivalent to "Queen Mother") to her younger brother Selim II (r. 1566-1574) and after with her nephew Murad III whose parents had died. In Ottoman Turkey, the valide sultan traditionally had access to considerable economic resources and often funded major architectural projects. Mihrimah Sultana's most famous foundations are the two Istanbul-area mosque complexes that bear her name, both designed by her father's chief architect, Sinan. Mihrimah's mosque at the Edirne Gate, at the western wall of the old city of Istanbul, was one of Sinan's most imaginative designs, using new support systems and lateral spaces to increase the area available for windows.
[edit] References
Imperial Harem : Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire 1993 by Leslie Peirce, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508677-5.
See Sinan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimar_Sinan
