WARNING! ADULTS ONLY! The following is a work of erotic horror fiction that describes the rape and killing of a young girl. While Suleiman did exist, the described events and all other persons are fictitious. If you are offended by this type of adult subject matter -- DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS WARNING! Most importantly, this must not be read by or knowingly forwarded to anyone under the age of eighteen, or whatever the age of majority is in their country of residence. To do so may be illegal.

THE SULTAN’S TOY: a Renaissance Turkish delight

(April 2) The little Russian princess knows she is going to be painfully choked into unconsciousness again tonight, just as she has been every night for the past six months since her purchase at the Cossack slave auction. But she doesn’t know if I’m going to do it to her before, during or after I ravish her. Nor does she know if I’m going to hang her, garrote her, or strangle her with my bare hands. Each night the cruel method and exquisite agonies are different, but the terror is always the same. For she does not know if tonight is the night she is to die for my enjoyment, as she has been told many times is her only purpose and inescapable destiny. As the youngest daughter of Vladimier, a minor prince from the Don basin, she has small worth as a Christian hostage, but as a vessel for my greatest passion she is supremely valuable; and as such the lovely Princess Natalie is doomed. I have spoken thus; no other word may be heard.

I have never permitted a captive girl to live this long. Usually tiring of them within a week or at most a month, the only pleasures they have to offer me then are found in their excruciating deaths. But delicately beautiful beyond measure, Princess Natalie, is so sweetly innocent, so desperately full of life, she never stops pleading and hoping that if she somehow pleases me sufficiently the pain will end and I will allow her to live. Small wonder tormenting her night after night is an endless feast of erotic enchantments that have captured my body and my very soul, and arousing my lust for the ultimate pleasure of killing her to such unbearable heights it seems like a window on Paradise. Yet with so  many incomparable delights to look forward to each sundown, I have been loath to bring her suffering and her life to their inevitable conclusions. Like a hori of legend, desirable beyond all telling, this golden-haired little goddess has become an irreplaceable jewel. Nevertheless I know in my heart that this exquisite little female must be killed while she still is vibrantly alive in body and spirit. The ideal moment for the adorable creature’s death must not pass and be lost forever. This most delicious of passion fruits must be plucked when it is ripened to perfection.

(April 11) At my order, the Grand Vizier and harem astrologers have consulted the moon calendar, and now I know tomorrow, after evening prayers in the Haji Sofia, will be a most propitious time to slowly and painfully squeeze the life from Princess Natalie’s tantalizing little body. It will be her eleventh birthday and my hour of fulfillment during an intoxicating night of absolute ecstasy. What a magnificent present this will make, for me! God is great! Bountiful are his gifts!

Translated from the Venetian chronicle, the above are alleged to be extracts from the secret personal journal of Suleiman I of Constantinople [Istanbul], the longest reigning sultan of the all-powerful Ottoman Empire, known in the Venetian and Turkish chronicles as Suleiman the Magnificent. 

While a few consider Natalie to be a Christian martyr, the is no evidence she was killed because of her faith. Suleiman was a devout Muslim, but he was a tolerant pragmatist rather than an fanatic believer. So perhaps it is because of her reputed innocence and exceptional beauty that ever since the 16th century men have been inordinately fascinated by the young princess’s fate, and the cruel manner of her death in particular. Even the infamous Marquis de Sade supposedly used the lovely Natalie as inspiration for the chapter in Justine in which its innocent young heroine is brutally garroted into unconsciousness during a savage rape. However this was entirely the product of the marquis’s dark imagination, because unfortunately the sultan kept his silence on the child’s killing and committed no details of the act to his journal. However, it may be significant that in the early 1920‘s, sections of this journal were found to be missing. 

In any event, for more than two centuries many scholars both Christian and Islamic considered the tale of Suleiman’s months-long torturous molestation and eventual murder of the lovely little princess to be an anti-Muslim myth fostered by the Vatican. A few learned men even doubted the existence of Princess Natalie of Novograd. However, researches during the late 19th century into the aristocratic birth records of the Russian Orthodox Church, proved beyond doubt that the princess was real. Furthermore, the brutalities of her fatal torture have been substantiated. The girl’s agonizing death was witnessed by a harem eunuch. His name has been lost to history, but he did leave an episodic written record of his life in service to Suleiman, which was unearthed in 1925 in the Topkapi Palace, as part of the voluminous archives of the recently deposed Turkish sultanate. Though the entry concerning Princess Natalie is brief and does not mention her by name, it is obvious it was she who met her painful end at the hands of the sultan on the evening of April 12, 1547. Sketchy as it is, here in a translation from the original Arabic is the anonymous eunuch’s record of the cruel events of that dreadful night: