When Hurrem Sultan died in the spring of 1558, she was not in the sultan's palace. She was back in the Old Palace, the women's palace across Istanbul that she had left for good seventeen years before.

Three foreigners who were in the city that spring left papers about her. A Venetian ambassador reported that she kept Suleyman close because she feared for her own life, on account of her illness. An envoy from the sharif of Mecca kept a diary. Eight days before she died he carried gifts to the Old Palace gate and could not get even a greeting through to her, and four days before, he watched the sultan sit through a whole audience without saying a word. The French ambassador wrote to the bishop of Dax on the day she died.

The envoy gives one word for where it hurt: kulunc. In 1558 it meant colic, a cramping pain in the belly. In Turkish today it means a stiff shoulder, and a modern book that read it that way reasoned its way to poison. The version online adds arsenic in a ring and a burial at midnight. The papers from that spring put her coffin on the viziers' shoulders, on its way to the mosque of Bayezid.

She also left a will, and we have not seen it. We know about it because her daughter Mihrimah told the sultan what her mother had ordered, and in 1562 a Venetian secretary wrote down what she said.

If the last line of this file stopped you, write one word in the comments: Haseki.

Chapters

0:00 Spring 1558
1:23 The file in five parts
1:42 Two palaces
3:35 Her last five years
6:16 The Venetian report
8:07 The man from Mecca
10:26 The morning
12:02 An oath and a funeral
13:56 The brothers
15:23 The will
16:46 Today

Sources

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (Basic Books, 2017), read in the Turkish edition, Hurrem Sultan (Is Bankasi Kultur Yayinlari)
Ernest Charriere, Negociations de la France dans le Levant, vol. 2 (1850): letter of Jean de la Vigne, April 1558
Eugenio Alberi, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, series 3, vol. 3 (1855): reports of Antonio Barbarigo and Marcantonio Donini
C. Ceyhun Arslan, "An Alternative Panorama: Ruins and Sickness in Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali's Journey to the Sublime Porte", Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences 19 (2020)
James Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (1890): "qulunj"
Cahit Baltaci, "Hurrem Sultan", TDV Islam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 18 (1998)
Haseki Training and Research Hospital, history of the hospital (hasekieah.saglik.gov.tr)

Reports from that spring are quoted as reports, including what they say only as rumour.

Typewriter sound: lonemonk, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

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