Titans of History

SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT

1494–1566

I who am the sultan of sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the shadow of God on earth, sultan and emperor of the White Sea [Mediterranean] and the Black Sea …

Suleiman the Magnificent writing to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1547)

Under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman empire, which stretched from the Middle East to North Africa, the Balkans and central Europe, reached its glorious peak. He expanded its borders, rooted out corruption, overhauled the laws, ruled with tolerance, patronized the arts and wrote fine poetry. His legacy was a vast, well-governed, culturally flourishing empire, which continued to thrive for a century after his death.

When Suleiman came to power as Ottoman sultan or padishah (emperor) in 1520, at age twenty-six, succeeding his father Selim the Grim, he inherited an empire centered on Turkey, which had been strengthened by his father’s acquisitions of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the two holiest Islamic cities, Medina and Mecca. Suleiman saw himself as the universal emperor, successor to the Roman emperors but also as “the second Solomon,” his namesake—he determined to expand this empire in every direction.

His first target was Belgrade. In the summer of 1521 Suleiman captured the Serbian city from the king of Hungary, striking a heavy blow against Christendom and opening the path for further expansion into Europe. By 1526 Hungary had more or less succumbed to the Ottomans, and though it took another fifteen years for a formal partition of the kingdom to be realized, Suleiman now had a springboard from which to attack Vienna. The high-water mark of Suleiman’s advance on central Europe came in 1529, when he tried unsuccessfully to capture Vienna. This failure contributed to establishing the limits of Ottoman hegemony in the 16th century. The struggle for Vienna was one of the most notable of those battles that saved Christian Europe from invaders—going all the way back to the defeat of Attila’s Huns at Châlons in 451, the Frankish victory over the Moors at Tours in 732, and the repulsion of the Magyars by the Germans at Lechfeld in 955.

In 1526 Suleiman had defeated Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, giving rise to a dispute over the Hungarian crown between the archduke of Austria, Ferdinand I, and Suleiman’s own choice, the subservient Transylvanian noble John Zápolya.

Ferdinand was married to Louis II’s sister and heiress, and he was also a member of the powerful Habsburg dynasty, headed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, ruler of Austria, Germany, the Low Countries and Spain. The battle for Hungary was thus a clash of two empires.

In spring 1529 Suleiman gathered an army of 120,000 men and marched them through Bulgaria. Bad weather caused the loss of numerous camels and bogged down the heavy cannon, but Suleiman managed to meet up with Zápolya and recapture several Hungarian fortresses, including the important city of Buda, before marching on Vienna.

Without support from Charles V, the archduke feared the worst. He left Vienna in the hands of the seventy-year-old Niklas Count Salm and fled to Bohemia. Salm, an experienced veteran, shored up the Viennese defenses around St. Stephen’s Cathedral and waited.

When they arrived, Suleiman’s troops tried to bombard the city’s defenses into submission. But the earthen reinforcements held firm. The Ottomans switched tactics and began digging trenches and mines to weaken the city walls. This, too, failed, and as a wet autumn approached, they attempted one final push.

Despite their superior numbers, the Ottoman besiegers were beaten back by the pikes of the Austrian defenders. Giving up hope, the Ottomans killed their prisoners and set off for home on October 14, having to endure heavy snowfalls and skirmishing all the way.

Suleiman had missed his chance to advance into the heart of Europe. Charles V reinforced Vienna with 80,000 troops, and Suleiman had to be content with consolidating his territory in Hungary.

Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, Suleiman set his sights on the western frontiers of the Persian empire. The shah avoided a pitched battle, and in 1535 Suleiman entered Baghdad. The capture of the city, along with lower Mesopotamia and much territory around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, meant that by the time a treaty was signed with the shah in 1554, Suleiman was indisputably the dominant force in the Near East.

The final thrust of Ottoman expansion under Suleiman secured Tripolitania (part of modern Libya), Tunisia and Algeria, a vast territorial gain that secured for the Ottomans a brief period of naval dominance in the western Mediterranean. Suleiman was now a key player in the battles between the kings Francis I of France and Charles V, the Habsburg emperor and king of Spain.

But territorial expansion was only one of Suleiman’s ambitions. In the Muslim world his legal reforms earned him the title Suleiman the Lawgiver. In particular, he concentrated on the Sultanic kanun—a system of rules in cases that fall outside Islamic Shari’ah.

As well as being an energetic reformer, Suleiman was also known as a scrupulously fair and even-handed ruler. He promoted his servants on the basis on their abilities, rather than of their personal wealth, their family background or their general popularity. He promoted tolerance of both Jews and Christians. He welcomed the wealthy, entrepreneurial and cultured Jews who had been expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. Meanwhile he continued the policy of promoting Balkan Christian slave-boys, converted to Islam, to high positions.

Suleiman was devoted to the arts. Not only was he himself a talented poet (many of his own aphorisms have become Turkish proverbs), but he also enthusiastically promoted artistic societies within the empire. Artists and craftsmen were given career paths, leading from apprenticeship to official rank, with quarterly pay, and Istanbul became a center of artistic excellence. Among the many fine mosques and other buildings commissioned by Suleiman is the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, which is Suleiman’s final resting place. During his reign, numerous bridges were built throughout the empire, such as the Danube Bridge, the Bridge of Buda, and the great aqueducts that solved Istanbul’s water shortage.

In Jerusalem, this “Second Solomon” rebuilt the walls, creating famed gates such as the Damascus and Jaffa Gates, and embellished the Dome of the Rock. But he ruled with brutal inscrutability: like his father who had murdered his brothers and his other sons. Suleiman attended the strangulation of his own son and heir, Mustapha, and ordered the killing of his long-serving vizier and friend Ibrahim Pasha.

Suleiman was lean, slim and laconic, cultivating his own mystique. But he was capable of love. His favorite slave-girl was a Russian/Polish blond nicknamed Roxelana who became his dominant wife; he renamed her Blossom of the Sultan—Hurrem Sulton. When he was away at war she wrote him passionate love letters and he wrote her love poems. She was a wily politician who managed to win their eldest son Selim II the Drunkard the crown. By the time he died of a stroke at the Battle of Szigetvar in 1566, his conquests had united most of the Muslim world, with all the major Islamic cities west of Persia—Medina, Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad—under the same ruler. Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the southern Mediterranean were also dominated by the Ottomans. There is no doubt that Suleiman fully deserved his Western nickname—the Magnificent.