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Suleyman the Magnificent's bid for world domination
00:37:35
Christopher de Bellaigue discusses the extraordinary life of one of the most powerful – and feared – men of the 16th century
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- [00:00]
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Christopher de Beleague
So Christopher, your new book the Golden Throne focuses on the fortunes of one of the most extraordinary individuals of the 16th century, and that is the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. I wonder if you could start by introducing Suleiman to our listeners, in what makes him such a fascinating figure, he's.
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Another way of looking at a period of history that we in this country know extremely well through Henry viii. And we think we've sort of got it covered because we know what Henry VIII was getting up to in his bedroom, and we also know that he was stripping the monasteries and declaring autonomy from Rome. But Henry didn't really fight very much, and he sat around and philosophized and thought about the bedroom a lot. There was a great deal going on in Europe and beyond at the same time. And he had several extremely important and influential contemporaries. We know a little bit about Charles V because they were related through marriage, through Catherine of Aragon. We know a little bit about Francis I, the French king, because of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The member of the quartet, who is arguably the most important of the lot, we know the least about in this country, and that is Suleiman the Magnificent. And he was a direct contemporary of Henry viii. He outlived him by some years. He just about out sired him. He had many children, but he certainly out fought him. He was on campaign from the time that he came to the Ottoman throne in 1520, almost every year. And these were very, very long campaigns. And the Ottoman Empire was growing under his rule until he died on campaign, appropriately enough, in 1566. And under Suleiman, the Ottoman Empire was engaged in an epic clash with the Habsburg Empire of Charles V. And they essentially clashed in all sorts of different parts of the world, in the Mediterranean, in central and northern Europe. At the same time, he was expanding eastwards and he got to India. And the Golden Throne contains an episode that most people will be completely unaware of, particularly students of Indian history, because it opens up a tantalizing possibility. Had Suleiman's invasion of India in 1538 been a success, had he managed to take Gujarat, as was his intention, then perhaps the history of India could have been entirely different and the British Raj could have been written out of history, or the history of the British Raj could have been written in a very different way. The other thing that's important to note about Suleiman is that he was engaged, quite coincidentally, in a reformation of his own. At the same time that Christianity was beset by schism and Martin Luther was declaring his independence from Rome and then attracting more and more adherents to reformist Christianity, Suleiman was grappling with a very great challenge from the east, and that was what we now know to be Shi'ism. And what was coming to be known as Shi'ism. At the time, Suleiman being the Caliph of Islam, the Caliph of the Sunni Orthodoxy, was increasingly challenged by Shiism. And so there are two kind of parallel schisms going on in the two Abrahamic, the great Abrahamic civilizations or empires of the time. And so all of this produces a remarkable story. And then you have the personal life of Suleiman, which was fascinating as well, which we can go into.
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Christopher de Beleague
So can you tell us a little bit more about the Ottoman empire of the 16th century and how powerful a force was the empire when Suleiman ascended the throne in 1520? And would it be fair to say that it kind of reached the pinnacle of its power under his rule?
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It reached the pinnacle of its power. Influence, refulgence, artistic achievement, administrative competence, military efficiency. It was programmed to conquer and conquer it did. And as more and more resources entered the empire, there was a possibility to beautify, beautify and embellish and increase the general magnificence of the empire. So Suleiman's reign coincides with the rise of the greatest of Ottoman architects, Mimar Sinan, whose. Anyone who's visited Istanbul will know Mimar Sinan intimately, because it is he who substantially defined the cityscape of Istanbul that we know today. The Janissary Corps, which was the crack infantry troop troops of the empire, formed of Christian converts, most of them taken from the Balkans. They were then converted, they were then given an excellent education, and they were turned into the Sultan's most loyal troops. They were considered, if not the finest, then certainly one of the finest and the most feared infantry forces in Europe. The trading possibilities that the Ottomans enjoyed at the time were very, very extensive. And I just think of one example. He built a fleet at Suez in order to go and attack Gujarat. This is not Suleiman himself, he was in Istanbul, but one of his pashas. And in order to do that, they needed to drag all of the material for building an 80 strong fleet of ships across the desert from the Nile. And only two items in their inventory, the flax for the sails and the ship's biscuit for the men's provisions, were sourced locally. Otherwise, everything else, all the wood and all the other equipment for the equipage of the ships had to be brought in from this extraordinarily extensive supply chain that extended the length and breadth of the empire. So you have a real apogee essentially on every score. When he came to the throne, he came to throne in the most propitious circumstances, because the Christian foe, the enemy was beset by the Reformation and also other divisions. So Henry viii, we know what he was up to. Francis I of France and Henry V of the Habsburgs, although on the same side, ostensibly in the reform Catholicism debate, were personal rivals, and they were constantly fighting against each other, which again diverted resources away from the common threat. And then you had Venice, who was this tiny city state that had extended across much of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, through a series of satellites, colonies, and relied increasingly on Ottoman goodwill in order to continue their trading activities. So the Venetians were considered a fifth column by many other Christians, and they identified their survival and ability to exist as being extremely linked to their relationship with the Ottomans. So they cultivated the Ottomans as far as they could, but the Ottomans were obviously much bigger than they and they could squash them whenever they wanted to. So you have a very interesting power dynamic within Europe. The Ottomans, essentially a European power, but at the same time an Asiatic power. So straddling the two worlds, straddling the worlds of Christianity and Islam in a most interesting and stimulating way.
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Christopher de Beleague
You said earlier that Suleiman spent a lot of his time at war. Can you talk us through two or three of the key clashes that defined his reign? Which battles really stand out from a distance of 500 years?
- [10:04]
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These battles that I'm going to talk about, they extend. I describe them in the Golden Throne and also in the predecessor volume, the Lion House, which is about Suleiman's rise to the point at which he becomes undisputed master of his own empire, because he rose with the help of others that he then needed to dispense with because they got too big for their boots. 1526, the Battle of Mohac is really the time when the Ottomans invaded, consolidated, destroyed the Hungarian nobility. And that was an extremely important battle, because for the next 200 years, the Ottomans would have a very substantial, if not predominant, presence in Hungary, and with all the added threat that that implied for Austria, the German principalities and Western Europe as a whole. That was an epic battle in which Suleiman commanded his troops. He was a commander in the field. He was very much an active commander. I would say that any of the engagements that his notorious Admiral Barbarossa took part in are also worth mentioning here. Suleiman was rarely involved in naval engagements himself. He was a soldier rather than a sailor. And it's a little bit like, I think, of today's tech companies in the States, when they were asked, what do you think about China becoming a major AI power? And they would sort of, as recently as Two or three years ago, they'd say, no, that's ridiculous. I mean, don't be ridiculous. The Chinese, how ridiculous. That is what the Western powers used to say about the Ottomans and sea. Sea power. They say the Ottomans, they don't even know one end of a ship from another. And indeed, the Ottomans, when they arrived in Anatolia a century and a half before, were not acquainted with seafaring, and they had to rely on Greeks and other Christian minorities to run their navy and run their merchant marine. But by the time of Suleiman, they'd invested substantially and they had some of the greatest admirals in history. Now, one of these was Hayreddin Barbarossa, who started life as a pirate, as many of the Ottoman leading admirals did, was brought in and legitimized, as it were, by the Sultan, and he made him his captain pasha. And so Hayreddin Barbarossa essentially terrorized much of Christian Mediterranean shipping, made it extremely difficult for the imperial fleet of Charles V and also the merchant marine of Charles V to conduct their business. There's one wonderful. It's more a victory of nature rather than a victory of one army or fleet over another. But I think of Charles V's suicidal attempt to take the North African city of Algiers from Barbaross's protege, who was a eunuch called Hassan. And Hassan was in Algiers, and Charles V arrived with a large fleet. All the cream of the Habsburg nobility were there. Some of them had just come back from the New World, where they'd been exploring and mining and enslaving, and they were full of the joys of spring because they were so rich and powerful. There was no way that this miserable eunuch called Hassan could mount a defense against them. So they send a knight to go and see Hassan, and they say, you better give up, because you've got no chance. And if you don't, then we won't leave one stone standing on another. And Hassan sends them away with a flea in their ear. This is in October or November of 1541, and you don't launch a maritime invasion of North Africa in the late autumn. And indeed, that very night when Charles V disembarks his enormous army and they invest the castle on the coast, there that is the time that the heavens open and one of the most cataclysmic storms of living memory takes place, which utterly destroys the army. Nothing can be fired. There's no gunpowder. The gunpowder becomes useless within a matter of minutes. The ships, half of them, are smashed on the rocks. And essentially what happens is that an act of God completely destroys this great ambition of Charles V to take Algiers, and he does in fact survive. But the loss of life is cataclysmic, and for years afterwards beach combers are going down the beach there, picking up sort of gold buckles that have come from Central America or silver plate from the English ambassador's smashed chest. And so cataclysmic is the loss of life for the horses that were brought ashore, that not a single horse survives because they end up having to eat the horses because there's nothing else to eat during the 10 or 15 days that they're on the beachhead there, that for years afterwards the emperor's couriers in Europe, in Spain go around the place on mule back because there simply aren't enough horses. All the horses died in that engagement. So that's another engagement that really sticks in the mind.
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- [16:39]
Christopher de Beleague
An intense rivalry between The Ottomans and the Habsburgs, Holy Roman Empire. But to what extent did that rivalry become personal between Suleiman and Charles? Do you get a sense of a real intense personal rivalry between these two very powerful, ambitious men?
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Home Depot Advertiser
Absolutely, one gets a sense of that. It's fascinating that these two men who never met, but who are communicating in so many subtle and different ways, develop this rivalry. It essentially comes down to the fact that both aspire to world imperial might. They both want to be the world's emperor. And there is no room in the world for two world emperors. Charles V came to power through bribery. His rival for that role was Francis I, but he gave more money. The Fugger bank also provided a lot of help, and so he became the Holy Roman Emperor. This, for Suleiman, who is in his position as the vice regent of God through divine intervention, is a very sort of grubby way to come to power. So that doesn't endear Charles to Suleiman. Charles also labors under the apprehension that he is king of Jerusalem, which, of course, is an Ottoman province. Suleiman doesn't like that at all. And in the first part of his reign, he is encouraged in this rivalry by a slave called Ibrahim, who was enslaved from his home in Albania, converted to Islam, became a very intimate friend of Suleiman at a very young age, before he came to the throne. And after he came to the throne, Suleiman brought Ibrahim with him to the Ottoman court. And everyone looked at this guy and said, well, who is this? We didn't know we were getting two. We thought we were getting one. And indeed, they did get two. They got two men of exactly the same age who, until 1536, when Ibrahim got too big for his boots and had to be cut down to size until 1536, essentially ran the empire in tandem. And one of Ibrahim's great preoccupations was show and pomp and display. And Charles V excelled at this. And he was crowned at Bologna. There were woodcuts distributed around the empire. Everyone knew about his different crowns. He was a celebrity. And Ibrahim said to Suleiman, well, you need to be a celebrity as well. And so he arranged a series of kind of displays and through a series of devices, including the construction of a fantastically ridiculous crown, he was basically Suleiman's impresario. And it was about impressing people and it was about showing off. And Ibrahim loved that. And for the first period of Suleiman's reign, Suleiman bought into that completely. Now, the interesting thing about these two great world leaders is that they didn't particularly want to meet head on in battle because the stakes would have been too high. There would have been just too much to lose. And so, in fact, what happens is that they spend their entire military career kind of circling warily around each other and then sending their commanders in to fight enormous pitched battles against each other. But the two emperors never actually meet in battle, which I think is extremely telling.
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Christopher de Beleague
Now, your book contains a wonderful cast of characters, one of whom is Martin Luther. You mentioned the Reformation already in this interview. What's his role in this story?
- [20:21]
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I start the Golden Throne with a section called A House Divided, and the house in question is, of course, Christianity. I want to illustrate just how ill equipped Christendom is to face the Ottoman threat. And so one of the ways I do that is by introducing an extraordinary scene that comes straight from the sources, when a papal envoy who is trying to damp down the Reformation, finds himself in a tavern with Martin Luther. And we have that from two sources, both from Luther and also from the papal envoy at the same time. And in putting these two men in a tavern and hearing them talk, you kind of get a sense of the very personal nature of the Reformation and the fact that Christianity is really tearing itself apart. Luther goes on to play an important peripheral role in my story, in the story of Suleiman. Suleiman feels very emboldened. He knows exactly what's going on in Europe, and he knows that Germany in particular, is falling to Lutheranism, that England has gone reformist, if not outright Lutheran. And he knows that the continent is substantially weakened as a result. He and Luther have a sort of strange relationship. He once says to a Christian envoy, he says, if Luther were just a little bit younger, he would have found in me a very gracious Lord. That is to say that he would have promoted and fostered Luther, because, of course, he is a kind of cancer in the heart of Roman Catholicism. Luther is told of this, and he says, God forbid that I should have such a gracious lord such as Suleiman. But at the same time, he regards the Turkish threat as a kind of biblical threat, something that God has sent down in order to punish Catholicism for its corruption, for the practice of indulgences, for all the excess that one associates with Catholicism and led him to start the Reformation in the first place. And so his attitude towards the Turks is slightly different to the attitude of the Pope and others who simply regard the Turks as an evil to be extirpated. On the contrary, he regards it as a sign of God's displeasure. And although he regards the Turks as a tremendous threat, he uses the Turks and his supporters, the princes and paladins of Germany. They use the Turkish threat in order to win concessions from the empire, and they do so consistently. So it's a very interesting, ambiguous, symbiotic relationship between the two.
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Christopher de Beleague
And what about Henry viii? How keenly would he have been aware of the growing power of the Ottomans? I mean, would there have been much communication between the court of England and Suleiman?
- [23:12]
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The communication really starts in the Tudor area with Elizabeth. So in Henry's time, as we know, Henry's a great fan of Ottoman fashions, and so he will often dress up as a Turk and he will wear a turban and he'll prance around the place pretending to be the Ottoman sultan. There isn't a huge amount of direct communication at the time. It's simply one end of the continent just seems a little bit too far away from the other. And they don't chafe or rub up against each other or indeed trade directly, enormously, although through kind of accidental and incidental means. One does get a sense of this trading pattern. There is, for example, there's a glut of English brass. And so the brass, the price of brass in the Ottoman Empire comes down substantially when, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, as a result of the entry of all this brass onto the market. So one does get a sense of the ramifications, but it's really only with Elizabet the first, that the English start to take the Ottomans seriously and start in particular to take the North African Barbary pirates seriously. So North Africa, it's worth remembering, was substantially under Ottoman tutelage, under Ottoman supervision or direct control. And these pirates, which set up kingdoms, they set up city states, they were much more than simply pirates. They were highly organized divisions of plunder that would plunder the coasts of Spain. And they also started to impinge on the English consciousness. And then, of course, you do find the odd English sailor who falls into the hands of the Barbary pirates and then joins the pirates and becomes a pirate himself. But that's the extent of the communication.
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Christopher de Beleague
Now, the subtitle of your book is called the Curse of a King. What is a curse to which you refer there?
- [25:10]
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You'd think that Suleiman had everything kind of figured out. He came to power unopposed. He's in charge of arguably the most important and powerful empire in the world that is showing no sign of slowing down. He has a wife whom he adores, Hurrem or Roxolana as she's known in the west, the daughter of a Ukrainian priest, we think, who was captured in a slave raid by the Tartary slave traders, sold on the Crimea, brought across the Black Sea and then was sold into the imperial harem where she attracted the attention of the Sultan. She has given him several children. They have a very normal monogamous relationship. Quite remarkable when you take into account the practices of many Ottoman sultans. And you'd think that he had everything made. But his great grandfather, Mehmet the Conqueror had decreed a very fateful decree that whichever of the Sultan's sons is destined to be the Ottoman Sultan is legally allowed to kill all his brothers. And this is a permission to fratricide, because this is not France where it's the eldest son, it's not Hungary where the nobles get together and they elect a king. The mantle of kingship devolves to the person whom God has favoured among the Sultan's able bodied sons. And so that builds into the Ottoman system the inevitability of a fratricidal bloodbath. Suleiman avoided that because his father had killed all the male relations. And so Suleiman was the only one who could become Sultan. But Suleiman's a nice guy, he doesn't have that bloodthirsty tendency and he's genuinely fond of his sons. And so over the course of his career, over the course of his reign, we gradually start to get the sense that things are building up towards a succession battle. And the succession battle we know will not happen after Suleiman has died, it will happen beforehand. People among his sons, they will start forming factions, they will start building power bases, and then they will move proactively in order to prevent their brothers from stealing a march on them. In this conspiracy, Hurrem, his wife is an extremely important part. And Hurrem is one of the more remarkable figures the 16th century, not only because she started life as a slave, but also because she comes to exercise so much power within the Ottoman Empire herself. And Hurrem has a rival and she's called Mahidevran. She was the Sultan's concubine before Hurrem arrived on the scene. And she bore the Sultan a magnificent son called Mustafa. And Mustafa is beloved of the Janissaries, he's beloved of the people. He shows all the qualities that one would want in a Sultan. But the problem is he is not Hurrem's son. And Hurrem is now the Sultan's wife and she has able bodied sons of her own. She also knows that should Mustafa come to the throne and Hurrem be still alive at the time, then Mustafa's mother, Mahidevran will ensure that life becomes very unpleasant for Hurrem. And so she feels that she must move proactively to nullify this threat and to destroy Mustafa and Mahadevran. And so much of the story of the Golden Throne is the story of this world. Conquering emperor, impotent in the face of this gathering storm, unable to do anything about it, because instinctively he wants to stay on the fence. He doesn't want to favor either or any of his sons, but at the same time, he's under enormous pressure. And so this builds to a gathering climax. And the climax, at least from one perspective, happens at the end of the Golden Throne, where there is a resolution of sorts, although other sons will remain and they will need to fight out again. But the question of Mustafa is the one that drives the plot of the Golden Throne, and a plot it is, because it is plotted in a way like a novel, even though all the information that is contained in the book is entirely factual and historical. But that is the curse that he must labor with.
- [29:36]
Christopher de Beleague
And the book's written in the present tense, isn't it? I mean, what was your thinking behind that? Because that's not an approach that a lot of authors would take. You obviously have, and it's been very successful. What kind of drove that decision?
- [29:51]
Home Depot Advertiser
I think the fact that it's in the present tense is it shouldn't be taken in isolation from the other stylistic approaches that I adopt in these books. It is part and parcel of an approach that I've taken, which is to make the reader feel as though they are as close as possible to the characters on the page and as close as possible to the actions that take place on the page. I was probably inspired by the diarist, the Venetian diarist that I read a lot of for the Lion House and who provided a lot of information not only about the Ottoman Empire, but also about Venice. And as I mentioned earlier, Venice was an extremely important player in the early part of Suleiman's reign. And reading and transcribing from these diaries that are describing events happening today, I suddenly realized the immediacy that that conveys and the ability of judicious use of the present tense to bring the reader into the room. And that is precisely what I'm doing. The other thing that I do is that I have an authorial voice that is obviously derived from my own, but in fact is derived very substantially from the primary sources that I read. I borrow, paraphrase, I try and convey the sense of language that I get from these primary sources. And the authorial voice or the narrator does not know what's going to happen next. So at no time in the narrative do you ever hear someone say, but what he didn't realize is that three months later he would be dead. Or there's no discussion of the historiography, no discussion of how a particular event has been viewed over subsequent centuries and how it might be viewed now. What I'm trying to do is to narrow, is to shrink the gap between the reader in 2025 and the event and the personality of the 1520s, 1530s and so on. Because there is such a vast chasm between us, I see it as absolutely incumbent on the historian to actually narrow that chasm, to see the common humanity, to try and understand these actions that may appear so weird, so bizarre, and to try and in that way, to make you invest in the characters and to feel for them and to live the events that they live.
- [32:15]
Christopher de Beleague
Now, you've clearly spent a lot of time over the last few years researching and writing about Suleiman, both for the Golden Throne and the predecessor, the Lion House. You mentioned earlier that he was a nice guy. Did you warm to him personally? And did you feel that you were able, during your research to kind of unlock the secrets of what he was really like as an individual, what it was like to be around him in the 16th century?
- [32:41]
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One has to really mine the sources, and you will find nuggets. He wrote a fair amount of poetry. You can derive a fair amount from the poems. He is depicted in a great many miniatures. You can see what things he would get up to. You can see what he looked like because there are so many accounts of meetings with him by European ambassadors. A lot of what I relied on and I'm forced to rely on, because the Ottoman chroniclers are by their very nature inclined to exaggerate, inclined to make him out to be this world bestriding colossus and much more than a simple human being. But if you want to reduce all that, and that is very important because it's part of his Persona. So you have to pay attention to the fantastic clothes and the fantastic sense of august majesty that he conveyed. But if you want to get behind that, you have to really mine the sources. And so you can, for example, you can find that he has two registers of anger. One is to look at the object of his anger, the person who has displeased him and look at that person until that person just wants the ground to swallow them up and the other is to bawl at them and get them out of the room that way. I would suggest that the first one is more dangerous than the second. It indicates a higher level of anger. Then you can see the letters that Hurrem wrote to him, which are so ebullient, so full of family gossip, so family. And you see that he's a great family man. You can see what he didn't do, how he rejected the example of his father, which was to kill every male in anticipation of his own death. No, he's not like that at all. When he gets angry and he threatens execution to someone, he very often goes back on that. He relents, he softens. There's a very human side to him. At the same time, if you look at the historical record and you tot up the number of people who were killed as a result of orders by Suleiman campaigns, and they run into the tens or scores of thousands. So we are not dealing with someone who is wary of shedding blood within the context of the late Renaissance period. He is definitely to be feared.
- [34:57]
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That was Christopher de Belague speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Christopher's book on this subject, the Golden Throne. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.