The Great Sultana

The Great Sultana enacts an oxymoronic mixture of Turk and Christian in its very title - it is an Eastern tale with a Spanish Old Christian protagonist. The play tells the story of the young Spanish captive Catalina, who grows into a great beauty in the seraglio while hidden by a sympathetic renegade. Cervantes based the plot of The Great Sultana both on historical and on fictional sources. The former describe a Corfiote or Venetian Christian woman of whom Amurates III was enamored. Fictional sources with similar plotlines include the Byzantine novels of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, as well as stories by Italian authors such as Bandello and Cinthio. Since Cervantes himself never traveled to Turkey, he most likely relied on commonplaces about "the Turk", or perhaps a textual source such as Viaje de Turquía.