Gülfem Hâtûn (c. 1497 - 1562) was, most probably, the harem Lady Stewardess during most of Süleymân I’s reign. Nothing is known of her origins, but she must have been a slave concubine who rose to the highest rank of harem management. According to tradition - but without evidence - she had been a concubine of Süleymân I’s and the mother of Şehzâde Murâd. In privy purse registers she is mentioned as only Gülfem Hatun and not as “mother of the deceased prince x”, prompting to think that she had not been a concubine after all.
Whatever her previous role, she enjoyed a certain degree of intimacy with Süleymân, judging by the informal style of her letters to him: “I drank the cologne right away, you should have seen the state I was in. There were guests, I have no idea what I said, I dozed the whole long day.… You made a complete buffoon out of me! God-willing, when we see each other again, we can talk about it.“, she recounted after she had mistaken a foreign cologne the sultan had sent her for a beverage.
She also must have developed a close relationship with Hürrem Sultan, as she would include only Gülfem other than her children among those who sent Süleyman greetings when he was away. At the beginning of Hürrem’s career, Gülfem seems to have been tasked by the sultan to check on his new concubine, as once she told him in a post-scriptum of a letter of Hürrem’s, that the she had found out from a certain Enver (probably a harem eunuch) that the concubine had spent everything Süleyman had allocated to her before leaving for Hungary except for 500 gold pieces. She also told him not to tell her this, as Hürrem did not know she had spoken with Enver.
In a 1552 register, she is listed as the recipient of 150 aspers a day, a lofty sum at the time, considering that the average stipend of a concubine was 6 aspers.
A year before her death, in 1561, she endowed a mosque in Üsküdar, which was built by the Imperial architect Sinan. The mosque, called the Gülfem Hatun Mosque, included a madrasa, a maktab (an elementary school), and her tomb. The mosque was intended for the use of women and opened to men only in recent times.
Gülfem Hatun died in 1562, in her sixties, and was buried in the tomb she had prepared for herself. On her tombstone, she is referred to as "Gülfem Hatun bint Abdullah”.
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