Fatma Sultan

Born before 1494, Fatma Sultan was the daughter of Selim I and Hafsa Sultan, positioned at the heart of Ottoman power during its most expansive century. Her brother was Suleiman the Magnificent, under whose reign the empire stretched from Vienna to the Persian Gulf. She lived into her seventies, dying around 1566, the same year her brother did—outlasting the sultan whose campaigns and legal reforms reshaped three continents. What she did in those decades, whom she influenced, what alliances she brokered: the sources stayed quiet.