The Sultaness

The Sultaness is the Sultan’s mother and the chief antagonist in the opening catastrophe of Constance’s story. When her son intends to abandon the sacrifices of his old religion and enter a Christian marriage with Constance, she treats his decision not as a private conversion but as a threat to the religious and political order she expects to control. Her response is a scheme of feigned conversion followed by a massacre: she uses ceremony, hospitality, and collective loyalty as instruments of betrayal, while Constance alone survives. Her role is therefore decisive not because she remains present throughout the whole narrative, but because her violence creates the exile and suffering through which Constance’s sanctity is tested and displayed.

Identity and Political Position

The Sultaness is introduced as the Sultan’s mother, an elderly woman described by the narrator as an “evil well of vices.” The phrase places her within a strongly moralized portrait: she is not merely a political opponent or a grieving parent, but a concentrated figure of corruption whose family position gives her access to the state’s most vulnerable points. Her influence depends on proximity to the Sultan and on her ability to gather the leading people of the realm around a common purpose.

Her motive is tied to the Sultan’s intention to forsake the sacrifices of his former religion. She sees that he means to leave those religious practices behind, and she interprets the proposed marriage as part of that transformation. The conflict consequently joins family authority, religious allegiance, and political succession. The Sultaness does not challenge Constance in open debate; instead, she converts the public resources of the court into a private instrument of opposition.

The Feigned Conversion

The Sultaness assembles the people of the realm and addresses them as lords, presenting the Sultan’s proposed change as a danger to the laws contained in the Koran. Her speech is organized around concealment rather than persuasion. She proposes that Christianity should first be feigned and endured as something light, while a feast and revelry are arranged under the appearance of reconciliation.

The plan is effective precisely because it borrows the outward forms of peace. A conversion ceremony and a public feast would normally mark a transition into a new religious and marital order; under the Sultaness’s direction, those same forms become a trap. Her strategy thus depends on the gap between visible ritual and hidden intention. She offers the appearance of acceptance while preparing an act that will erase the political community gathered around the Sultan’s new course.

The narrator emphasizes the contrast between the magnificence of the assembled company and the concealed purpose of its organizer. The gathering possesses royal splendor, yet the Sultaness is compared to a scorpion or a wicked ghost, contriving a mortal sting beneath her flattering manner. The image makes her characteristic action one of delayed violence: she does not reveal hostility until her victims are placed within reach and trust has made resistance difficult.

The Massacre and Constance’s Survival

At the feast, the Sultaness and her friends carry out the planned slaughter. The guests are stabbed and cut to pieces at the table, every one of them except Constance. The setting matters: the table, conventionally associated with fellowship and shared abundance, becomes the scene of coordinated murder. The feast’s social intimacy intensifies the betrayal, since the victims are destroyed while gathered under the promise of celebration.

The Sultaness’s objective is political as well as murderous. After the massacre, she intends to lead the whole country. The deaths are therefore presented as an attempt to remove the people and structures that might support the Sultan’s conversion and marriage. Her violence seeks to turn maternal authority into sovereign control, replacing the Sultan’s chosen religious and dynastic future with her own regime.

Constance’s exception to the slaughter gives the event its providential and narrative force. She is not simply one survivor among many: her solitary preservation separates her from the murdered court and sends her into a new phase of wandering. She crosses herself and prays to the cross of Christ, responding to political treachery with a visible act of Christian devotion. The Sultaness’s violence creates the immediate conditions of Constance’s sea exile, but it also supplies the first great contrast between destructive human will and the divine protection that the narrative repeatedly attributes to Constance’s survival.

Opposition to Constance’s Story

The Sultaness is the negative counterpart to Constance’s pattern of patient endurance. Constance is repeatedly displaced, judged, and exposed to forces beyond her control, yet the narrative presents her as maintaining faith and moral constancy. The Sultaness, by contrast, acts through concealment, manipulation, and force. Her authority is active but ethically inverted: she can convene an assembly and command a collective action, but she uses those powers to destroy rather than to preserve communal order.

The contrast also operates through religious identity. Constance’s Christianity is represented through the cross, prayer, marriage, and later conversion scenes involving Hermengild and King Alla. The Sultaness’s religious opposition appears through her defense of the old sacrifices and through the deceptive performance of conversion. The narrative thus makes sincerity and simulation structurally opposed. Constance’s outward gestures disclose inward faith, while the Sultaness’s outward gestures conceal murderous intent.

The Sultaness’s actions also prepare the later pattern of accusation and judgment in Constance’s life. After the massacre, Constance continues to encounter societies in which public authority can be bent by hostility and false appearances. Her subsequent sufferings include accusation and trial, but the feast establishes the most extreme version of the danger: a whole court is converted into a killing ground before truth can be heard. The Sultaness therefore functions as the originating figure of the story’s recurring conflict between innocent reputation and hostile political interpretation.

Narrative Role and Evaluation

The Sultaness appears in a concentrated episode, but the consequences of her decision extend through the remainder of Constance’s trajectory. Her plot is a hybrid of political revenge, thwarted conversion, persecution, and exile. She attempts to prevent a marriage and a religious transformation by destroying the people who would embody them; instead, her action sends Constance into the chain of events through which Christianity reaches new communities and Constance eventually moves toward Rome.

Her characterization is deliberately severe rather than psychologically expansive. The narrator identifies her through vice, age, treachery, and the image of the stinging scorpion. This moral compression makes her less a rounded domestic figure than an embodiment of corrupted power, especially power exercised through kinship and ceremony. Yet the familial basis of her opposition remains important: she is not an external invader, but the Sultan’s mother, someone whose intimate place within the ruling household gives her the means to betray its public future.

The Sultaness’s ending is not narrated as a separate personal conversion, repentance, or punishment. Her decisive consequence is instead the collapse of the order she tries to preserve and the forced movement of Constance into exile. By surviving the feast, Constance turns the Sultaness’s attempted erasure into the beginning of a larger providential narrative. The Sultaness wins the immediate scene through massacre, but the story assigns the lasting meaning of that scene to the survivor rather than to the perpetrator.