Welcome to the History Tricks where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here is your 30-second summary.

Kidnapped as a young girl and sold into slavery in a foreign land, Graham Sultan captured the heart of a king and transformed the course of an empire.

The End. Let's talk about Harim Sultan, otherwise known as Empress Roxellana.

But first, let's drop her into history.

In 1502, Henry VII was the king of England.

In his son Henry VIII, our favorite around here, since the sarcasm, was only 11 years old.

The Catherine of Eragon had just married Henry VIII's brother Arthur, the Prince of Wales. Her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, were ruling a newly-unified Spain.

And Isabella had just sent Christopher Columbus on his fourth, final, and ultimately fatal, visit to the new world.

China was in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, and Leonardo da Vinci had just become the chief military engineer for Cesare Borgia, brother of Lucretia Borgia.

Died this year, unfortunately, Arthur, Prince of Wales, see Episode 22 of the History Chicks podcast for how his death changed the course of history.

Also that year, in Estasia, or maybe Alexandra, family name unknown, was probably born in Ruthenia, which was then within the Kingdom of Poland, but now is located within Ukraine.

Some sources say she was the daughter of a priest, others that this isn't after fact, to give her story some spice, but we'll never know, because her entire childhood is shrouded in mystery.

At some point, in her early teens, Anastasia, why don't we go with that?

Was kidnapped from her village in a raid by the charters, were only a couple of decades into a 300-year tradition of the charters roaming the left-third of what is now Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus, and parts of Poland, and abducting people to funnel into the slave trade.

As many as 20,000 a year, according to some estimates, although there was one banner year that you would honestly hate to be alive for, where the numbers seemed to be 400,000 slaves taken.

That doesn't account, in fact, for the people who died trying to prevent their loved ones being taken, nor those who died en route to the slave markets of Kafa, and beyond. They were typically forced marched at a great pace for fear of pursuit.

This wasn't a political affair. The sale of slaves was literally the economy of the Crimean-tarders.

At the slave market, these poor people were bought by the Lot, and then sorted into classifications and dispatched from there to Persia, or in Anastasia's case to the Ottoman Empire.

The vast majority of men were used by the Navy there for Galley service, rowing killed so many slaves that there was always a need for replacements to be slotted in as they died, and most women were sold into a sorted domestic service.

Let's leave it there. But before the general sale, high officials went through and pulled out extraordinary physical specimens, the strongest men to be trained to become Janissaries, these crack-strong troops of the Ottoman army, some places the Tarders overran had an agreement where they had to pay literally a tax in children every year, and these children were also drafted into the Janissaries.

And the loveliest women were to be sent to the heroms of high officials in Constantinople, and Estasia was quite beautiful with striking red hair and felt easily into this latter category, and was taken into service in the household of the Sultan's granddaughter, and given eventually a new name, Hoorim, meaning the cheerful one.

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