Topkapi Palace Museum

This guide to Istanbul's Topkapi Palace follows Hurrem, brought here in chains around 1520 as a captured teenager and eventually made Suleiman the Magnificent's legal wife, the first Ottoman concubine to hold that place. It traces how she moved the harem from the Old Palace into Topkapi itself, wrote to foreign kings, and commissioned buildings as far as Jerusalem, breaking a distance every sultan before Suleiman had kept from the women around him. It also follows the 1536 strangling of Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, once the most powerful man in the empire after the Sultan, and the argument historians still have over Hurrem's part in it. Worth pausing in the harem quarters to picture how close she stood to the throne room.