5

Possessor of the kingdoms of the world

[SULTAN SÜLEYMAN] HAS drawn near to [God], the Lord of Majesty and Omnipotence, the Creator of the World of Dominion and Sovereignty, [Sultan Süleyman] who is His slave, made mighty with Divine Power, the Caliph, resplendent with Divine Glory, Who performs the Command of the Hidden Book and executes its Decrees in [all] regions of the inhabited Quarter: Conqueror of the Lands of the Orient and the Occident with the Help of Almighty God and His Victorious Army, Possessor of the Kingdoms of the World, Shadow of God over all Peoples, Sultan of the Sultans of the Arabs and the Persians, Promulgator of Sultanic Qanuns, Tenth of the Ottoman Khakans,Sultan son of the Sultan, Sultan Süleyman Khan . . . May the line of his Sultanate endure until the End of the Line of the Ages!¹

Thus run the extravagant claims recorded in the inscription over the main portal of the great mosque Sultan Süleyman I built in Istanbul in the 1560s, during the last years of his reign. He was a contemporary of the ambitious Renaissance monarchs of Europe – the Holy Roman Emperors Charles V of Habsburg and his brother Ferdinand I; Charles’s son Philip II of Spain; the French Valois kings Francis I and his son Henry II – rivals of the Habsburgs; the English Tudors, Henry VIII and his children, Edward VI, Mary I and the ‘Virgin Queen’, Elizabeth I; and of Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, tsar of Muscovy. Shah Isma‘il still ruled in Iran when Süleyman came to the throne and the Mughal emperor Akbar in India from 1556. Such European observers as the Venetian ambassadors to his court ranked Süleyman with these and called him ‘the Magnificent’ or, simply, ‘the Grand Turk’.

The Venetian envoy to Istanbul described Süleyman on his accession in 1520:

. . . only twenty-five years old, tall and slender, but tough, with a thin and bony face. Facial hair is evident but only barely. The Sultan appears friendly and in good humour. Rumour has it that Süleyman is aptly named,^* enjoys reading, is knowledgeable and shows good judgement.²

He was fortunate in that his accession was uncontested; yet it seems unlikely that Selim should have sired only one son when he had six daughters, and it is possible that there were brothers who were executed in 1514 to prevent a coup while Selim was on campaign against the Safavids – but whom the sources neglect to mention. Süleyman ruled the Ottoman Empire for 46 years, longer than any other sultan, and led his army on thirteen campaigns to the frontiers of his domains.

Europeans marvelled at the pace of Ottoman military conquest. Those who visited the empire during Süleyman’s reign sent an eager audience at home highly-coloured accounts of their experiences, dwelling also on the grandeur and display of diplomatic relations, court ritual, and architecture. But these splendours were not what most struck his Ottoman contemporaries, and Ottoman writers of later times. Süleyman declared on his accession that even-handed justice would be the hallmark of his reign, and soon overturned some of his father’s decisions which seemed to run counter to this intention. One of his first acts was to compensate the Iranian merchants at Bursa whose silk Sultan Selim had confiscated when he banned commerce with the Safavids. The craftsmen and scholars who had forcibly been deported by Selim on his conquests of Tabriz and Cairo were allowed to return home, and governors who exceeded their powers and abused their trust were punished.³ Caliph al-Mutawakkil was permitted to return to Cairo from his enforced exile in Istanbul.⁴ Such acts as these and the attention which he later gave to codifying the laws of the empire led Ottoman writers of the eighteenth century and since to describe Süleyman as ‘Kanuni’, ‘the Legislator’.⁵ The epithets ‘Magnificent’ and ‘Legislator’ highlight the differing perceptions Europeans and Ottomans had of Süleyman’s reign, but they also broadly evoke its contrasting phases: from his accession until the execution in 1536 of his favourite, the grand vezir İbrahim Pasha, the Sultan lived as an ostentatious, public figure; during the remaining thirty years of his sultanate, until his death in 1566, he led a sober existence and was rarely glimpsed by his subjects or foreign visitors. A Venetian envoy in Istanbul wrote of him in 1553:

. . . [he] now drinks no wine . . . only fair water, on account of his infirmities. He has the reputation of being very just and when he has been accurately informed of the facts of the case he never wrongs any man. Of his faith and its laws he is more observant than any of his predecessors.⁶

The renunciations that characterized Süleyman’s later years have been attributed to the approach of the Islamic millennium in the year 1591–2, and the need he felt to prepare himself for the perfect world that was imminent.⁷ It did not need the closing of a millennium to arouse expectations among the monarchs of the time and Europe, too, was awash with apocalyptic notions which affected dreamers at all levels of society. In Spain, for example, the crusading enthusiasm of the late fifteenth century was in no way diminished by its destruction of the Islamic kingdom of Granada in 1492, for there were souls to be won in North Africa and the New World. Christopher Columbus, for instance, became obsessed with the twin goals of recovering Jerusalem from Muslim rule and converting the world to Catholicism, and saw himself as the Messiah of the last days.⁸

In 1530 the Habsburg emperor Charles V revived the idea of the Holy Roman Empire as a universal monarchy and was crowned by the Pope in Bologna: the Holy Roman Empire had been the medieval state encompassing Italy and much of central Europe that was fancifully seen as the successor to the Roman Empire and purported to unite all (Catholic) Christians under one sovereign. Soon after, in an elaborate ceremony in 1547, Ivan IV was crowned tsar of all Russia: this bold assertion of equality with the kings of Europe – on whom only the pope could confer their title – was also a statement of his claim to be heir to Byzantium and, himself, the universal monarch.⁹

With their millennium approaching, Islamic rulers had yet greater reason to promote visions of the world that matched their boundless ambitions, and did so in various ways. In India, the Mughal emperor Akbar’s response was to emphasize the secular and religiously neutral character of his multiethnic state, and his ‘pursuit of reason rather than reliance on tradition’;¹⁰ the Safavid shah Isma‘il cast himself as the ‘restorer of justice’ and ‘true religion’ among his Kızılbaş followers; and his rival Sultan Süleyman also saw the pursuit of justice as the key, but in an orthodox Sunni Islamic guise.

In this climate of fierce competition, the use of grandiose titles was an effective way to publicize pretensions to universal kingship. Like his inscriptions, Süleyman’s decrees, correspondence and coinage became suitable vehicles for this purpose. Following his conquest of Syria and Egypt in 1516–17, his father Selim I had referred to himself as ‘world conqueror’, a term indicating absolute sovereign authority in the most uncompromising way. Süleyman perpetuated this claim, and in chancery documents such as this letter to King Sigismund I of Poland-Lithuania in 1525 the territorial extent of his empire was spelled out in exaggerated terms:

. . . padişah of the White [i.e. Mediterranean] and the Black Sea, of Rumelia, Anatolia, Karaman, the provinces of Dulkadır, Diyarbakır, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and all the lands of Arabia, of Yemen, and of the many lands conquered with overwhelming power by my noble fathers and magnificent grandfathers.¹¹

His father Selim’s conquest of the Mamluk state gave Süleyman Jerusalem, but he was not the only one to claim it: when the French entered Naples in 1495 Charles VIII was acclaimed king of Jerusalem; Charles V of Spain also saw himself in this role (as did Philip II after him), and prophecies that he would capture the city abounded in the West.

From Süleyman’s accession, his father Selim’s aggressive policy in the east was superseded by one of disengagement: Süleyman sought to contain Iran, not conquer it. Envoys sent secretly to the Safavid court at Tabriz to ascertain the risk posed by Shah Isma‘il established that he was preoccupied by an army of the Sunni Özbek state which lay to his east, which was again threatening Safavid territory. This left the new sultan free to set out on his first campaign¹² – in the west, where unfinished business demanded his attention. Like Shah Isma‘il, European monarchs were also occupied elsewhere – Charles V with the first stirrings of the Reformation and Francis I of France with resisting Charles’s claims against his territories in Italy – and unprepared for a sudden reversal of Ottoman policy after years of peace. Süleyman aimed to capture the great fortress of Belgrade which neither Murad II nor Mehmed II had been able to wrest from Hungary. Hungary was weak and isolated and unable to respond, and on 29 August 1521 Belgrade surrendered after a siege of almost two months. Some of the defenders who had hoped to remain were forcibly exiled to Istanbul where they were settled near the fortress of Yedikule; others from the towns and castles of Srem, the tongue of land between the Danube and Sava rivers, were settled in villages of the Gelibolu peninsula.¹³ Several other Hungarian strongholds also fell to the Ottomans, who now had access to the route westwards along the Sava and the possibilities of water-borne transport which it offered. Possession of Belgrade after the failed sieges of 1440 and 1456 provided the Ottomans with a strong forward base for any push into the heart of Hungary.

Next it was the turn of Rhodes, another stronghold Mehmed II had failed to capture and which the Knights had feared Selim would surely attack. What the Ottomans found insupportable was not that Rhodes sheltered and supplied pirates who made attacks on Ottoman shipping, but that the Knights held as slaves many Muslims captured on corsair raids while making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who managed to escape from Rhodes complained of the harsh treatment they received, which often ended in death for those who did not escape or could not afford to ransom themselves.¹⁴

Süleyman commanded his army in person; the siege lasted five months and the Ottomans accepted the surrender of Rhodes on 20 December 1522. The Knights had sustained great losses, and were allowed to go free; settlers from the Balkans and Anatolia soon arrived to take their place. The Knights sailed west but could find no permanent refuge until in 1530 they settled on the inhospitable island of Malta – ‘merely a rock of soft sandstone’ – which Charles V offered them on condition that they take responsibility for the defence of the Spanish outpost of Tripoli in North Africa.¹⁵The conquest of Rhodes brought the Ottomans a step closer to full control of the eastern Mediterranean basin. They failed, however, to exploit the island’s commercial or strategic possibilities; the Venetian envoy Pietro Zeno noted this neglect almost immediately, observing in 1523 that ‘the Sultan has no use for Rhodes’.¹⁶ Of the large islands in the region, only Cyprus and Crete remained in non-Ottoman hands.

Selim I’s victory over the Mamluks brought into the empire subjects with a history quite unlike that of the peoples the Ottomans had conquered before. Campaigns against Byzantium and the Christian states of the Balkans had to some extent been inspired by the rhetoric of ‘holy war’, whereby it was the duty of Muslims to extend the rule of Islam over non-believers. In Anatolia, the lesser states the Ottomans annexed were, like themselves, Turkish in origin and Muslim, sharing a common culture. The Mamluk lands required a fresh approach, for although the majority of the population was Muslim, these new Ottoman subjects were Arabs, whose culture and traditions were older than and very different from those of the Ottomans.

The Mamluk conquests were soon reorganized as Ottoman provinces and the aim was to establish a relationship which would encourage their new subjects to believe in the ‘naturalness’ of the Ottoman order. The preamble to the law-code of the Syrian province of Tripoli promulgated in 1519 gives an idea of how the Sultan sought to legitimize his sovereignty. It stated that the province had hitherto been held by ‘tyrants’ – meaning the Mamluks – from whom God had wrested power to bestow it on more worthy rulers, the Ottomans. The Mamluks were said to have misused their mandate from God; Ottoman rule, by contrast, would usher in an era of justice under the leadership of the Sultan, to whom were ascribed many of the qualities usually reserved for the Almighty.¹⁷

The appointment to administrative positions of prominent members of the ousted regime was another stratagem the Ottomans used to ease their assumption of power. To govern the provinces of Damascus and Egypt Sultan Selim had appointed men who had collaborated with the Ottomans – the former Mamluk governor of Damascus, Janbardi al-Ghazali, was reappointed to the province and the former Mamluk governor of Aleppo, Khayr Bak, went to Cairo as governor of Egypt. Very soon after Selim’s death, however, Janbardi al-Ghazali led an uprising against his new masters, declaring himself sovereign and entering into diplomatic relations with the Knights of Rhodes, from whom he sought military and naval support.¹⁸ Revealing as it did the weakness of Ottoman authority in the recently-conquered Mamluk state, only a few days’ voyage east of the island, this was a further incentive for Süleyman to conquer Rhodes. He sent an army to put down the revolt, and Janbardi was killed. Khayr Bak died in 1522 and was succeeded as governor of Egypt by Süleyman’s brother-in-law Çoban (‘Shepherd’) Mustafa Pasha, who in 1524 had to crush an attempt by the next Ottoman governor Ahmed Pasha to re-establish the Mamluk sultanate with himself at its head. Süleyman considered this so alarming that he sent his favourite, his grand vezir and brother-in-law İbrahim Pasha – married to his sister Hadice Sultan – to govern Egypt, re-establish law and order and oversee the enactment of a law-code for the province.

İbrahim Pasha had been born a Venetian subject at Parga, on the Ionian coast opposite Corfu, and after his capture by the Ottomans had served in Süleyman’s household in Manisa when he was prince-governor of Saruhan. Almost as soon as he became sultan, Süleyman publicly demonstrated the favour in which he held İbrahim by building him a magnificent palace on the Hippodrome in Istanbul.^* Having inherited his first grand vezir, Piri Mehmed Pasha, from his father, Süleyman appointed İbrahim to succeed him. Such promotion, of someone who was not a vezir but a senior officer of the Sultan’s household, was extraordinary.

The transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule was handled more circumspectly following the revolts in Syria and Egypt. The Egyptian law-code of 1525, couched in conciliatory tones, aimed to appease the local population and protect them against any excesses on the part of the alien Ottoman military.¹⁹ Once the internal situation had been stabilized and dissent bought off for the foreseeable future, the Ottoman state could begin to benefit from the revenues of Egypt – ‘the jewel in the Ottoman crown and an indispensable source of its financial stability’, as a modern historian puts it.²⁰ The Ottoman province of Egypt, like the Mamluk state before it, was responsible for the organization of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, but even after the retention of revenue for this purpose and for the upkeep of the Islamic Holy Places a welcome surplus remained to be sent annually to the central Ottoman treasury in Istanbul.

Once İbrahim Pasha had established a sound basis for Ottoman rule in Egypt, the way was open for a more vigorous effort to protect the empire’s commercial and territorial interests in the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, with which naval assistance rendered to the Mamluks in the time of Bayezid II had given Ottoman captains some familiarity. While the Mamluks still ruled Egypt the Portuguese had sent fleets into the Red Sea, and the consequent loss of revenues from the spice trade adversely affected the Egyptian economy. İbrahim hoped to make the Red Sea secure for Ottoman vessels and ordered the readying of a fleet at Suez under the captaincy of Selman Reis, who prepared a report which included a lengthy description of Portuguese enclaves on the coasts of the Indian Ocean and of the abundant riches of Yemen and ports in the Red Sea, and recommended an aggressive strategy of conquest.²¹

Another seafarer who favoured a forward policy in the Indian Ocean was the mariner and cartographer Piri Reis, who had commanded part of the fleet that lent logistic support to the overland attack on Egypt by Selim I in 1516–17 and had been İbrahim Pasha’s pilot on his voyage to Egypt in 1524. Piri Reis had presented Selim with a map of the world drawn by himself, and had also composed a naval manual, the Kitâb-i Bahriyye (‘Book of Seafaring’), a detailed compendium of nautical information about the seas and coasts of the Mediterranean, prefaced by an analysis of Portuguese activity in the Indian Ocean. When İbrahim returned to Istanbul in 1525 – after only a few months in Egypt – he brought a new edition of this manual to Süleyman’s attention, in the expectation that the Sultan would share his vision for expansion in the Indian Ocean.²² But althoughİbrahim’s energetic successor as governor of Egypt, Hadım (‘Eunuch’) Süleyman Pasha – who was governor for a total of twelve years – built up the Suez fleet in response to attacks by the Portuguese on both pilgrim and merchant vessels, which aroused Ottoman fears that they might occupy the Holy Places, appeals to Istanbul for action prompted only a modest response. A challenge to Portuguese supremacy in the Indian Ocean was planned for 1531 but had to be postponed because the guns and munitions were needed in the Mediterranean instead.²³ Doubtless at Hadım Süleyman’s instigation, the Ottomans embarked in 1531–2 upon the digging of a canal between the Red Sea and the Nile which was intended to provide an alternative route for the spice trade, out of reach of the Portuguese. Reports in the diaries of the contemporary Venetian chronicler and archivist Marino Sanudo tell of thousands of men working on this project – which was never completed.²⁴

Soon after İbrahim Pasha returned to Istanbul from Cairo, he was appointed to command the imperial army on campaign in Hungary. With the Sultan he set out for the front, and on 29 August 1526 the Ottomans emerged victorious over the army of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in a two-hour battle in the marshes of Mohács in southern Hungary; King Louis was drowned while escaping and those of his forces who had not been killed fled the field. The Ottoman victory at Mohács was as momentous in its consequences as that of Sultan Murad I against the medieval Serbian kingdom at Kosovo Polje in 1389 and initiated a 150-year struggle between Ottomans and Habsburgs in central Europe.

The core territories of the Habsburgs covered much of present-day Austria, but at the end of the fifteenth century judicious choice of marriage partners made the dynasty rulers of a far-flung empire. The marriage in 1477 of the future Maximilian I of Habsburg with Mary, heir to Charles ‘the Bold’, Duke of Burgundy (who also ruled over the Low Countries), was followed in 1496 by that of Maximilian’s son Philip to Juana, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Although sixth in line to her parents’ united throne, Juana succeeded after all those with prior claim died. On the death of Maximilian in 1519, his heir Charles V, eldest son of Philip and Juana, was ruler of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, along with Navarre, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Spanish America; the dukedom of Burgundy, and the Netherlands; as well as the Habsburg lands in Austria. In 1521 Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand married the daughter of Wladyslaw of the Jagiellon dynasty, king of Hungary and Bohemia, and the following year their sister Mary was wed to Wladyslaw’s son, Louis [II]. From 1521 the Austrian domains of the Habsburgs were given to Ferdinand to govern autonomously as archduke.²⁵

The Austria of Archduke Ferdinand was not perceived as any immediate threat by Süleyman and his advisers who associated Habsburg might with Charles V and his wars in western Europe, where the main foes of the Habsburgs were the Valois of France. From 1494, when Charles VIII of France had seized the kingdom of Naples, until 1503, when it was won by Spain, their rivalry had been acted out in southern Italy; thereafter, the focus of their struggle had shifted to the north of Italy. The battle fought on 24 February 1525 at Pavia, south of Milan, is considered decisive: his army routed, King Francis I of France was captured on the battlefield by Charles V and taken to captivity in Spain. He was released a year later after agreeing to surrender some of his territories and renouncing his claims in Italy; Francis also agreed, under duress, to co-operate against the Ottomans. While Francis was still a prisoner, a French envoy had in fact been sent to ask for Süleyman’s help in freeing him and to request the Sultan’s assistance against Charles, but the envoy had been murdered, together with his suite, by the governor of Bosnia. Francis’s letter reached Istanbul, however, and Süleyman responded favourably. After his release, despite his undertaking to Charles, Francis was able to reply in July 1526 that he hoped to be able to reciprocate in the future.²⁶

How far Süleyman thought his warm relations with Francis would result in practical assistance is unclear. The Sultan had his own reasons for marching into Hungary in 1526, and recent scholarship suggests that he had intended to do so from the time of his successful siege of Belgrade in 1521. Selim’s victories had stabilized the Ottoman eastern frontier and, in any case, the war of Ottoman Muslims against their co-religionists in the Safavid and Mamluk states had never been popular among the military forces of the empire. Once the Knights Hospitallers, a long-time irritant to the Ottomans, had been driven from their base at Rhodes in 1522, the possibility of taking advantage of the fall of Belgrade to invade the Hungarian kingdom became a realistic proposition.²⁷

Süleyman advanced to the Hungarian capital of Buda after his victory at Mohács, entering the city on 11 September. Sultan Mehmed II’s contemporary, King Matthias Corvinus, had been a generous patron and discriminating collector of Italian artefacts – textiles, ceramics, goldwork, glass and statuary. He had also founded a library of unparalleled fame. Possession of the spoils of defunct kingdoms was an eloquent statement of superiority and the Ottoman conquerors carried rich booty back to Istanbul. Many manuscripts were seized: over the centuries some found their way back west, and Sultan Abdülhamid II is said to have returned the remainder to Hungary in 1887; a few, however, may still be in the Topkapı Palace library. The pair of monumental bronze candlesticks taken from the Cathedral of the Virgin on the Buda citadel still flank the prayer niche of Ayasofya.²⁸

The future lines of the Ottoman conflict with the Austrian Habsburgs became apparent when two competing candidates arose to claim the Hungarian throne following King Louis’s death. John Zápolya, voyvode of Transylvania, who was related to Louis by marriage, was elected to succeed by the Hungarian diet and crowned King of Hungary in November 1526. Meanwhile, Archduke Ferdinand had claimed the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia in right of his wife, and been elected King of Bohemia in October 1526. In November Ferdinand was also elected King of Hungary by a faction favouring Charles V; fear of the Ottomans eased his path to these thrones – to many of the Hungarian nobles, the Habsburgs seemed the dynasty most able to resist this threat. In September 1527 Ferdinand drove Zápolya out of Buda and was crowned King of Hungary on 3 November.²⁹

Louis’s death at Mohács had changed everything for the Ottomans, who found themselves confronting a dynasty as ambitious as their own instead of an independent Hungary, greatly weakened since the days of Matthias Corvinus. Ferdinand was now cast as the Ottoman foe in central Europe and, it has recently been argued, it was only a matter of time before conditions would be ripe for Ottoman efforts to be directed more energetically at the Habsburgs across their common border.³⁰ Charles could offer Ferdinand no help against the Ottomans because in 1527 he had had to go on the defensive against a league led by France to resist Habsburg domination in Europe. The unhappy result was that Rome was sacked by his forces in May of that year and the Pope, who had joined the league, was taken prisoner. The French besieged Naples in 1528, and in 1529, in order to leave himself free to deal with the religious troubles of the Reformation, Charles agreed the Peace of Cambrai with Francis – who again agreed to renounce his Italian claims.

Ferdinand’s assumption of the Hungarian throne produced a new direction in Ottoman policy. After the defeated Zápolya retreated from Buda, first into Transylvania and then into Poland, he opened negotiations with Süleyman, leading to the conclusion of an alliance between them in February 1528. As the victor at Mohács, Süleyman considered the Hungarian crown his to bestow, by right of conquest, and promised it – but not the territory itself – to Zápolya. In this the Sultan was less than sincere, seeing Zápolya’s kingship as a temporary measure intended to stabilize the situation in Hungary until he could take on Ferdinand directly. On 10 May 1529 Süleyman set out with his army for Vienna. En route at Mohács, John Zápolya was received in audience by the Sultan, after which Buda was retaken from Ferdinand who had scant resources in both manpower and money to call upon, whether in the Habsburg lands in Austria or in Hungary itself. In spring 1528 he had despatched envoys to Istanbul to negotiate peace – but they had been sent home empty-handed.³¹ The march was fraught with logistical difficulties caused by heavy rains and floods, and it took almost four months for the Sultan’s forces to reach Buda from Istanbul, and another two weeks to reach Vienna, where they arrived in the last days of September. The operation of the Ottoman army in Hungary was always extremely arduous. Many large rivers – of which the greatest is the Danube – flow across the plains of central Europe, producing terrain that was waterlogged for much of the year before the drainage schemes of modern times made progress on land easier. Ottoman supply-lines were over-extended, and the troops were exhausted. Although in only moderate repair the city walls of Vienna withstood Ottoman assault, and after only three weeks Süleyman gave the order to retreat. His bedraggled army returned to Buda where Zápolya was crowned with the crown of the revered king of medieval Hungary, St Stephen, in a symbolic act aimed at undermining Habsburg claims to the Hungarian throne. Süleyman and his troops then continued to Belgrade and so to Istanbul. This siege of Vienna (like the one in 1683 during the wars that ended Ottoman sovereignty in Hungary) became a metaphor for Muslim aggression against the Christian world in the minds of contemporaries and later commentators alike, defining their attitudes to the West’s Muslim neighbour.

In 1532 Süleyman led another campaign into Hungary but the nearest his land forces got to Vienna was the small town of Kőszeg (Güns), some 80 kilometres to the south of the city, which capitulated only after a three-week siege. Süleyman agreed to leave Ferdinand in possession of northern and western Hungary – known as ‘Royal Hungary’ by contemporaries – but did not abandon his claims there.³² That summer an Ottoman fleet off the southern Peloponnese was harried by a Habsburg armada under the command of Charles’s talented Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, which seized the ports of Nafpaktos and Koroni. This reverse prompted Süleyman to improve his fleet and appoint as grand admiral Hayreddin Reis – known as ‘Barbarossa’ on account of his red beard – a corsair from Lesbos operating out of Algiers, who had entered the service of Selim I shortly before his death: Nafpaktos and Koroni were soon won back.³³

After truce negotiations with Ferdinand in 1533, Sultan Süleyman sent İbrahim Pasha eastwards. The Safavid shah Isma‘il, whose policies and actions had brought so much aggravation to Selim I, had died in 1524, when his son and successor Tahmasp, a boy of ten, became the victim of a power struggle among the Kızılbaş chiefs to whom the Safavids looked for support. This infighting, and frequent Özbek attacks into Safavid territory, weakened the state built up by Isma‘il and reduced the possibility of Safavid incursions into Ottoman Anatolia: Ottomans and Özbeks recognized their common interest in undermining the Safavids.³⁴ In 1528 the Kızılbaş governor of Baghdad offered his submission of Süleyman, but was soon killed and Safavid authority re-established. The frontier between Ottoman and Safavid territories reconfigured itself as the Safavid governor of Azerbaijan province defected to the Sultan, and the Kurdish emir of Bitlis, west of Lake Van, to the Shah, but İbrahim Pasha and his army arrived in the region late in 1533 to find Bitlis again in Ottoman hands.³⁵

İbrahim Pasha spent the winter in Aleppo. In the summer of 1534 he took Shah Tahmasp’s capital of Tabriz. Tahmasp fled rather than face the Ottomans – like his father before him, he avoided confrontation, a tactic which added to the uncertainties of campaigning in Iran. After a three-month march across Anatolia in the summer heat, Sultan Süleyman joined İbrahim and his men in Tabriz, and they decided to pursue the Shah. Two months later, after a long march through the snowy uplands of south-west Iran, the Ottoman army reached Baghdad and the city surrendered. As the seat of the caliphate between the mid-eighth century and the murder of the incumbent by the Mongols in 1258, Baghdad was important to the Ottoman dynasty’s efforts to legitimize their claims to pre-eminence in the Islamic world. During the months that Süleyman remained in Baghdad he made a miraculous discovery that mirrored Sultan Mehmed II’s finding of the tomb of the Muslim saint Ayyub Ansari at the time of the conquest of Constantinople. The religious lawyer Abu Hanifa, founder of the school of law favoured by the Ottomans over the other three law schools of Sunni Islam – the Maliki, the Shafi‘i and the Hanbali, which continued to function alongside the Hanafi school in the Arab provinces – had died in Baghdad in 767 CE; Süleyman ‘rediscovered’ his tomb and, asserting his sacred authority over Baghdad, repaired it, adding a mosque and hospice.^* Süleyman also built a dome over the tomb of the theologian and mystic ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani,³⁶ thereby claiming the saint for the orthodox practice of Islam, and completed a mosque begun by Shah Isma‘il³⁷ which thus became a Sunni rather than a Shia sanctuary. In the course of this campaign, known as the ‘campaign of the two Iraqs’ (that is, ‘Iraq of the Arabs’ or Lower Mesopotamia, and ‘Iranian Iraq’, the mountainous region to the east), the most sacred shrines of Shia Islam – Najaf, where the Prophet’s son-in-law ‘Ali was buried, and Karbala’, site of the tomb of ‘Ali’s son Husayn – had also fallen into Ottoman hands; Süleyman wrote of his visit to these shrines in a letter to Francis I.³⁸ Süleyman’s temporal right to Baghdad was soon formalized by the proclamation of a law-code for the new province of the same name. At many points it resembled the Safavid code but tax burdens were eased and practices considered extra-legal by the victorious Ottomans were annulled. His aim was to demonstrate that Ottoman justice was superior to that of the vanquished Safavids.³⁹

The Ottomans clashed with the Habsburgs in the western Mediterranean as well as in Hungary and the Peloponnese. Portugal had established outposts on the North African coast since the early fifteenth century and Spain, once it had annexed Granada and its ports, embarked on its own programme of aggression against the indigenous Muslim population. Spain’s crusade in North Africa was termed the Reconquista, on the grounds that these lands had once been Christian,⁴⁰ and Charles V saw his enthronement in 1530 as Holy Roman Emperor as reinforcing his moral authority to press forward with the consolidation of Spanish power. The beleaguered Muslim population of North Africa addressed pleas for assistance to the Sultan – as protector of the Muslim community – and an intense contest between Habsburgs and Ottomans ensued. Ottoman naval policy in these waters relied on the skills, honed by years of experience, of the corsair captains of the North African shores who were employed by the Ottoman state to redirect their energies to the struggle with Spain: Barbarossa was only the most famous among them. The corsairs sometimes overthrew those they were employed to protect: in 1534 Barbarossa seized Tunis from the Muslim Hafsid dynasty (in response to which Charles sent a fleet to retake the port and caused a massive fortress to be built nearby at La Goletta for his Christian garrison). As Ottoman authority gradually extended some way inland in North Africa, local Muslim dynasts realized that their independence could be compromised as much by Istanbul as by Madrid. The possibility of annexation by the Ottoman Empire was a prospect as unwelcome to many of them as it had been to those on the frontier in east and south-eastern Anatolia.

Süleyman and his advisers had become adept at exploiting the long-running rivalry and hostility between Charles V and Francis I, and 1536 saw another episode in what a modern historian has described – in view of Francis’s undertaking to his fellow Christian sovereigns to assist in the defence of Italy in the event of an Ottoman landing there – as his ‘comedy of opposition to the Turks’.⁴¹ Since before the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans had extended to Venetian and Genoese merchants the privileges known as ‘capitulations’, by which they were allowed to establish trading communities; under the Mamluks (and under the Ottomans after the fall of the Mamluks) French, Venetian and Catalan merchants enjoyed such privileges within Syria and Egypt, and in 1536 the French negotiated the extension of their privileges throughout the Ottoman Empire – and the Ottomans were accorded similar privileges in French territories. This acknowledgement of a special relationship with France was one of the last initiatives taken by İbrahim Pasha, who was executed a month later; trade apart, the aim of the agreement was to secure the Ottomans an ally against the Habsburgs.⁴² Süleyman sent an envoy to Venice proposing that it enter the Ottoman–French alliance but this was met with a refusal⁴³ – Venetian fear of the Habsburgs was greater than its fear of the Ottomans.

Ottoman relations with Venice had on the whole remained unaffected by cross-currents in European politics, but repeated clashes on land in Dalmatia and at sea in the Adriatic heralded a new phase. Moreover, İbrahim Pasha’s execution deprived Venice of a friend at the Ottoman court. In 1537 the Sultan marched to Vlorë on the Adriatic coast apparently with the intention of launching a two-pronged attack on Italy with the help, from the south, of Barbarossa and his fleet. This might have been the chance to conquer Rome, as its inhabitants still feared was Süleyman’s aim: the Sultan’s goal, Francis I said in 1531 to the Venetian ambassador at the French court, was to reach Rome.⁴⁴ Barbarossa laid waste the area around Otranto, while Sultan Süleyman attacked the Venetian island of Corfu, but when it became clear that only a long siege would yield the fortress to the Ottomans, they withdrew. The Venetians’ former good understanding with the Ottomans was destroyed and Venice agreed to participate with Charles V and the Pope in a Holy League to crusade against them. On 27 September 1538 an allied fleet under Andrea Doria met the Ottomans under Barbarossa in the seas off Preveza, an Ionian coastal town south of Corfu. Barbarossa’s victory laid bare the relative weakness of the other naval powers in the western Mediterranean. Faced with the disruption of the trade with the Ottomans which was essential for its prosperity – and especially the grain to keep its citizens fed – in 1539 Venice sued for peace: its expectation that a Christian alliance would serve the longer-term aim of protecting its vulnerable coastal outposts from Ottoman attack was doomed, for Charles’s overriding purpose was to defend the western Mediterranean and Spain against the depredations of the North African corsairs, who were aided and abetted by Hayreddin Barbarossa. For Venice, the price of the peace eventually concluded late in 1540 was the cession to the Ottomans of its remaining fortresses in the Peloponnese, some of which it had held for three centuries, and the payment of a large indemnity.⁴⁵

Even as the Ottoman navy was seeing action in the Mediterranean, the governor of Egypt, Hadım Süleyman Pasha – recently returned from the ‘campaign of the two Iraqs’ – was sailing to help a Muslim ruler across the Arabian Sea. In 1535 Bahadur Shah, the sultan of Gujarat, had been defeated by the Mughal emperor Humayun, and called on Portuguese help. He allowed the Portuguese to build a fortress at Diu, at the southern tip of the Gujarat peninsula, the entrepôt for the transmission of spices westwards from India; but once the danger from Humayun had passed, he appealed for Ottoman help against the Portuguese. Hadım Süleyman sailed from Suez with a fleet of 72 vessels and appeared off Gujarat after nineteen days at sea.⁴⁶ The Portuguese had in the interim executed Bahadur Shah, and their stout fortress held out against the Ottoman guns. News of the approach of a Portuguese relief fleet prompted Hadım Süleyman to raise the siege and make for home, but despite the failure of his mission this proved a turning point in Ottoman–Portuguese rivalry in the region for he had demonstrated that the Ottoman fleet was capable of crossing the Arabian Sea. On the way to Diu, Hadım Süleyman took the port of Aden, and the strategically-important province of Yemen was established in the south of the Arabian peninsula – albeit that the Ottoman grip there was tenuous. Diplomacy soon ensured that control of the maritime routes into the Red Sea was in Ottoman hands; the Ottomans and Portuguese exchanged envoys following the 1538 campaign, the respective commercial spheres of the two states were recognized, and security for their merchants was agreed.⁴⁷

There was stalemate in affairs in Hungary after 1532: the Ottomans had failed in a second attempt to capture Vienna, but Ferdinand was in no position to contemplate aggression against them. The Sultan’s vassal Petru Rares, the Voyvode of Moldavia, was suspected of collusion with the Habsburgs, and in 1538 Süleyman led an army against him, took the former Moldavian capital of Suceava, and temporarily removed Petru. He also annexed southern Bessarabia, the wide coastal strip between the mouths of the Danube and the Dniester known to the Ottomans as Bucak, and occupied the northern Black Sea littoral from the Dniester to the Boh with the fort of Cankerman (on the site of modern Ochakiv) at the mouth of the Dnieper – control of this territory was of strategic importance for the passage from the Crimea of the Tatar cavalry who were an essential component of the Ottoman campaign army. On the Dniester lay the fortress of Bender (on the site of modern Tighina) to which was affixed an inscription bearing a strikingly bold assertion of Süleyman’s claims to vanquished – or partly-vanquished – states, Safavid, Byzantine and Mamluk: ‘In Baghdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the caesar, and in Egypt the sultan’.⁴⁸

In 1538 John Zápolya and King Ferdinand concluded a pact. They agreed that each was to have the title of king in their respective parts of Hungary but that when John died, his territory would pass to Ferdinand. On 22 July 1540, John Zápolya died, two weeks after the birth of his son, who was named John Sigismund. Hastening to capitalize on this unexpected situation before the Ottomans could respond, Ferdinand laid siege to Buda. As Charles V’s brother, Ferdinand’s succession to the throne of Hungary would effect an extension of the Holy Roman Empire that Süleyman could not countenance, so he promised his protection to the infant John Sigismund and in spring 1541 set out to settle scores with Ferdinand. Having raised the Habsburg siege of Buda, he brought central Hungary under direct Ottoman rule. Ferdinand retained the western and northern parts of the former kingdom of Hungary while John Sigismund – with George Martinuzzi, the Bishop of Grosswardein, as regent – was given Transylvania to rule as an Ottoman vassal.

Istanbul’s relationship with the Ottoman vassal state of Transylvania was rather different from that with the long-time vassal states of Moldavia and Wallachia. Initially, in the mid-sixteenth century, no Ottoman troops were stationed in Transylvania. The voyvode of Transylvania was elected by the local diet for confirmation by the sultan, whereas the voyvodes of Moldavia and Wallachia were the sultan’s appointees. Nor was the voyvode of Transylvania required to send his sons as hostages to the Ottoman court. Transylvania’s annual tribute was lower than that of the Danubian principalities, and there was no requirement to provide goods or services for Istanbul as the latter were obliged to do.⁴⁹

The early years of Süleyman’s reign were marked by extravagant displays and triumphal processions of a kind alien in many respects to previous Ottoman practice. The Hippodrome in Istanbul again became the scene of public entertainments and pageants, as it had been under the Byzantines. From royal weddings and circumcisions to the execution of non-conformist preachers, the significant rites of life and death were observed here. The first such event was the marriage in 1524 of Süleyman’s sister Hadice to İbrahim Pasha, when the public celebrations lasted fifteen days. Forty days of festivities followed the circumcision of Süleyman’s young sons Mustafa, Mehmed and Selim – the future Sultan Selim II – in 1530. This last occasion presented a matchless opportunity for an unambiguous statement of Ottoman power, and the tents of their defeated rivals – the Akkoyunlu, the Safavids and the Mamluks – were accordingly displayed to the crowds, while at the feast the hostage princes of the Akkoyunlu, the Mamluks and the Dulkadıroğulları were ostentatiously seated close to the Sultan.⁵⁰

As grand vezir and brother-in-law to the Sultan, İbrahim Pasha both masterminded and revelled in these costly displays, while his supervision of the renovation of the Topkapı Palace between 1525 and 1529 gave his extravagance further rein. Mehmed II’s council hall and treasury were demolished to make way for a much larger eight-domed treasury and three-domed council hall built adjoining the Tower of Justice. A striking improvement was the extensive rebuilding of the Hall of Petitions at the entrance to the third court – this is the free-standing structure which to this day bars visitors from direct access into the heart of the palace. The sumptuous decoration and furnishing of this hall was remarked by contemporaries who saw it as an exquisite harmony of silver and gold, jewels, precious textiles and marbles.⁵¹ The French antiquarian Pierre Gilles, who visited Istanbul soon after the agreement of the capitulations with France, described the Sultan sitting on a low couch to receive ambassadors, ‘. . . in a little apartment built with marble, adorned with gold and silver and sparkling with diamonds and precious stones. This Room of State is encircled with a portico that is supported by pillars of the finest marble, the capitals and pedestals of which are all gilded’.⁵²

The Sultan and Grand Vezir, well-informed about matters in the West, quickly received details of Charles V’s splendid coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in 1530, and as quickly interpreted it as tending to reinforce the claim that the Holy Roman Emperor saw himself as the recreated caesar of the Roman Empire. Sultan Mehmed II had aspired to be a universal sovereign and had been seen as a rival by Matthias Corvinus, in his day the most powerful figure in central Europe, who fancied himself the new Hercules or (like Mehmed himself and, according to the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth century, both Selim I and Süleyman) Alexander the Great.⁵³ Süleyman could not leave this perceived challenge unanswered. From Venice İbrahim Pasha commissioned a gold helmet of four superimposed crowns surmounted with a plumed aigrette. It reached Edirne in May 1532, by way of the Ottoman tributary port-city of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic, as the Sultan was leading his army towards Hungary. The helmet-crown was prominently displayed at the audiences Süleyman gave and played its part in the carefully-choreographed triumphal parades that took place along the route to war, for the benefit of the foreign ambassadors and other observers the Sultan wanted to impress with his power. The Habsburg envoys Süleyman received at Niš seemed unaware that the turban was the headgear of sultans, and thought this gaudy regalia was the Ottoman imperial crown. Neither the timing of İbrahim Pasha’s commission nor its form was accidental. The helmet-crown bore stylistic similarities to the Emperor’s and also to the papal tiara – but with more tiers it symbolized a challenge to their power.⁵⁴

İbrahim was like a brother to the Sultan, his intimate adviser and highest officer of state, and this very closeness made him enemies. In 1525 his palace on the Hippodrome was sacked in a janissary uprising in Istanbul that may have been incited by his rivals.⁵⁵ In the matter of the helmet-crown, the state treasurer criticized him for extravagance in commissioning it during an expensive campaign. The helmet-crown’s absence from contemporary Ottoman written sources and miniature paintings alike indicates disapproval of its purchase. The state treasurer also took İbrahim to task for extending the ‘campaign of the two Iraqs’ to Baghdad at great financial cost,⁵⁶ and İbrahim used the power of his rank to have the treasurer executed.

The relationship between Süleyman and İbrahim was reminiscent of that between Sultan Mehmed II and his favourite, the grand vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelović. Süleyman could be as merciless as his great-grandfather and, like Mahmud Pasha, İbrahim was suddenly executed at the whim of his master, in March 1536, soon after his return from the ‘campaign of the two Iraqs’. The Sultan had given him, as grand vezir, every latitude in both public and private arenas; now he was buried in an unmarked grave. During his lifetime İbrahim was referred to by the soubriquet ‘Makbul’ (‘Favourite’) but, once he was dead, a play on words changed this to ‘Maktul’ (‘the Executed’). He was little mourned: after his death, a crowd smashed the three bronze statues of classical figures he had brought back in 1526 from the palace of Matthias Corvinus in Buda and set up outside his own palace on the Hippodrome.⁵⁷ İbrahim’s execution marks the end of the first phase of Süleyman’s reign.

During his years as grand vezir İbrahim Pasha had had a contender for Süleyman’s affections – the Ruthenian slave-girl Hürrem Sultan, Roxelana as she is known in the West, Süleyman’s haseki, or ‘favourite’. She bore him their first child in 1521 and Süleyman married her with great ceremony in 1534 after she had produced six children, five of them sons. A European witness described the wedding:

The ceremony took place in the Seraglio, and the festivities have been splendid beyond all record. There was a public procession of the presents. At night the principal streets are gaily illuminated and there is much music and feasting. The houses are festooned with garlands and there are everywhere swings in which people can swing by the hour with great enjoyment. In the old Hippodrome a great tribune is set up, the place reserved for the Empress and her ladies screened with a gilt lattice. Here Roxelana and the Court attended a great tournament in which both Christian and Moslem Knights were engaged and tumblers and jugglers and a procession of wild beasts and giraffes with necks so long they as it were touched the sky.⁵⁸

Hürrem Sultan was said by a Venetian ambassador to be ‘young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite’.⁵⁹ Süleyman was deeply in love with her and, once she supplanted all others in his affections, faithful to her alone. His marriage to a freed slave was as much a break with convention as his swift promotion of İbrahim Pasha to the grand vezirate had been.⁶⁰

The procurement of women – whether as war booty or via the slave trade – for the private households of the sultan and other wealthy and powerful men paralleled the youth-levy by which the Ottomans raised soldiers and administrators for the empire. The wordharem by which these private households were known – which in Arabic means literally ‘a place that is sacred and protected’ – at that time signified both the quarters assigned to the women of the palace and the women themselves collectively. As their empire became ‘more Islamic’, the Ottomans adopted the practice of other Muslim dynasties by permitting slave concubines rather than their legal wives to bear the sultan’s offspring. The politics of Ottoman reproduction had the unique feature that, from the reign of Mehmed II if not earlier, concubines were allowed to produce only one son, although they could give birth to daughters until the birth of a son curtailed their childbearing. This was presumably achieved by means of sexual abstinence or birth control, but we are ignorant of the methods that might have been used. The humble beginnings and ‘unencumbered’ status of concubines meant that, unlike the royal brides of the earliest Ottoman times, they had no dynastic aspirations of their own, no potential as agents either of foreign powers or of would-be domestic rivals to the Ottoman sultans. The logic of the one-mother-oneson policy was that since all sons of a deceased sultan had a theoretically equal chance of succeeding their father, the extent to which their mothers could promote their chances of succession was critical. While Ottoman princes were serving as prince-governors in the provinces, their mothers played a vital role in preparing them for the throne; had one concubine borne two princes, however, she would have had to choose which she would ally herself with in the inevitable succession struggle.⁶¹

Süleyman’s marriage to a concubine was shocking enough; his disregard for the one-mother-one-son norm still more so. Hürrem was accused of having bewitched him. After their marriage she moved with her children from the Old Palace into Topkapı Palace, where her apartments in the haremadjoined those of the Sultan – another innovation many frowned upon. The quarters assigned within the Topkapı Palace to the harems of previous sultans had been comparatively small, and İbrahim Pasha oversaw their enlargement to accommodate this new ‘royal family’ and their retainers.⁶²When they were apart, Hürrem wrote passionately to Süleyman in prose and verse, and provided him with a valuable link to palace affairs when he was away on campaign. Probably in 1525 she wrote:

My Sultan, there is no limit to the burning anguish of separation. Now spare this miserable one and do not withhold your noble letters. Let my soul gain at least some comfort from a letter . . . When your noble letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you. Their weeping has driven me mad, it is as if we were in mourning. My Sultan, your son Mir Mehmed and your daughter Mihrimah and Selim Khan and Abdullah send you many greetings and rub their faces in the dust at your feet.⁶³

Although Hürrem Sultan’s place in Süleyman’s affections was unassailable she was jealous of İbrahim Pasha, for he had been close to the concubine Mahidevran, mother of Süleyman’s eldest surviving son Mustafa. As Hürrem usurped Mahidevran’s position, so Mustafa’s status as heir-apparent altered in favour of her sons. The celebration of the marriage between Süleyman and Hürrem sealed the fates of Mahidevran and Mustafa, and left İbrahim as Hürrem’s only remaining rival. She has been suspected of complicity inİbrahim’s execution, and the circumstantial evidence is persuasive.

*

Ottoman victory over the Safavids at Baghdad and against the Holy League at Preveza, the truce with the Portuguese after the Diu campaign, and the annexation of much of Hungary, all gave only temporary break in hostilities: within a few years activity resumed on each front. In 1542 a Habsburg attack on Pest, across the Danube from Buda, was repulsed by local Ottoman forces, and in the next year Süleyman again set out westwards and took a number of strategic fortresses which were added to the province of Buda. Ottoman successes encouraged Ferdinand to sue for peace and a five-year truce was agreed in 1547 with the grand vezir Rüstem Pasha (who had married Süleyman’s daughter Princess Mihrimah in 1539). Although Ferdinand still held the far northern and western regions of the former Hungarian kingdom, the truce imposed the humiliating obligation to pay an annual tribute to the Sultan.

The truce of 1547 held for a while, but when in 1551 the intrigues of Bishop Martinuzzi, the power behind the Transylvanian throne, handed Transylvania to Ferdinand, reuniting a large part of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, Ottoman retaliation was not long delayed. The governor of Rumeli, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, moved into Transylvania to besiege the capital, Timişoara, taking a number of important strongholds on the way; the arrival of reinforcements and the lateness of the season saved the city for a while, but it fell to the Ottomans in 1552 and became the centre of the new Ottoman province of Temeşvar, comprising the western part of Transylvania. That same year the Ottomans failed to take Eger, to the north-east of Buda, despite a hard-fought assault, but the other strongholds they acquired served to consolidate Ottoman rule for the future. Two provinces – Buda and Temeşvar – were now under direct Ottoman rule, and for the first time Ottoman Hungary was a compact entity, defended by a continuous chain of fortresses, some newly-built but most captured from the Hungarians.⁶⁴

Both Habsburgs and Ottomans had to compromise in the exercise of their rule in Hungary. Neither imperial power could by itself afford to annex, administer and defend Hungary, but had to rely on the Hungarian nobles who had survived the Mohács debacle. Many of the Hungarian nobility had become Protestant in the Reformation, and it was necessary for Ferdinand and his government to treat them with circumspection if they were to share the burden of defence against the Ottomans. The Ottomans were able to manipulate the split between Catholics and Protestants as they had earlier played off Catholic and Orthodox but, like the Habsburgs, had to accommodate the still-powerful nobles who continued to exercise many of the day-to-day functions of government in Ottoman Hungary as they did in ‘Royal Hungary’.⁶⁵

His north-western frontier stabilized with the truce of 1547, Sultan Süleyman embarked upon another campaign against Iran when Shah Tahmasp’s brother Alqas Mirza defected to the Ottomans. Alqas Mirza was the governor of the Safavid province of Shirvan in the Caucasus, to the west of the Caspian Sea, and his relationship with his elder brother had always been uneasy; when Tahmasp sent a force to quell his insubordination, he fled to Istanbul by way of the Crimean port of Feodosiya. Süleyman sent Alqas Mirza ahead of him on campaign in 1548, but although the Ottoman army reached Tabriz, it abandoned the city for lack of supplies. It was clear that Alqas Mirza lacked both the local support and the ambition to usurp Tahmasp, and Süleyman returned home with little to show for his expedition except the capture of the frontier city of Van and some rich booty, including a tent commissioned by Shah Isma‘il which was one of Tahmasp’s most prized possessions. Alqas Mirza professed Sunni Islam but this appeared to be nothing more than a pragmatic gesture, for he soon returned home – though there were those who thought Süleyman’s grand vezir Rüstem Pasha had induced him to go by casting doubt on his loyalty to Süleyman. Alqas Mirza sent a letter to Tahmasp to ask his pardon, but he was killed on Tahmasp’s orders early in 1549.⁶⁶

Taking advantage of Ottoman reluctance to campaign on their inhospitable eastern frontier, Tahmasp soon set out to regain the territories recently lost. In 1554 Süleyman retaliated, again leading his army in person. Yerevan (capital of modern Armenia) and Nakhichevan in the southern Caucasus marked the farthest extent of his campaign, during which the Ottomans copied their adversary in adopting scorched-earth tactics in the border zones from which the Safavids launched their raids. The first formal peace treaty between the two states – the Treaty of Amasya – was signed in 1555. By its terms the Ottomans kept their earlier conquests in Iraq; Süleyman’s second and third Iranian campaigns, however, had brought no lasting gain and it seemed that coexistence was the most either party could hope for.

In the Mediterranean, stalemate was also in sight. An attempt by Charles V in 1541 to capture Algiers from Barbarossa’s deputy there, Hadım Hasan Agha, was foiled only by a chance gale which blew up and saved the hopelessly outnumbered Muslim defenders from the mighty Spanish armada. On the other side, throughout the years of Ottoman–Habsburg engagement in the western Mediterranean, Ottoman commanders in North Africa made frequent and devastating raids on the north Mediterranean coast – in 1543, for instance, the Italian islands and the coast of Naples suffered.⁶⁷

In 1551 the port of Tripoli – held for Charles by the Knights Hospitallers, now based on Malta – was successfully besieged in a joint operation by an Ottoman imperial fleet and a fleet under the command of another legendary corsair, Turgud Reis. Obliged as they were by the terms of their agreement with Charles to defend Tripoli, the Knights on Malta viewed the Ottoman presence there with great unease. A joint Spanish–Hospitaller fleet reached the island of Jerba, to the west of Tripoli, in spring 1560 and built a strong fortress to serve as a forward base for ousting the Ottomans from this part of the Mediterranean, but a fleet sent from Istanbul besieged and captured the island. Ottoman confidence at sea seemed unbounded. Some years of peace ensued, but in 1565 came an unexpected reverse when an Ottoman siege of the Knights’ Maltese stronghold failed.⁶⁸ Like earlier Ottoman defeats, this was hailed as a portent of the triumph of Christendom, a straw grasped at by the western powers as they sought consolation for the failure of their strategy in the Mediterranean basin.

Policing the Arabian Sea and its salients was a formidable task for the Ottomans, an exacting test of their ambitions during which their naval potential and limits became apparent. Ottoman vessels were as yet inferior to those of the Portuguese, more suitable for coastal sailing than for crossing the wide ocean. Following the Diu expedition and the accommodation reached with the Portuguese in the Arabian Sea, the rivalry between the two powers was acted out rather closer to home, especially in the Persian Gulf. The port of Basra at the head of the Gulf was taken by the Ottomans after Baghdad fell to them, offering another gateway onto the Arabian Sea closer to India than their existing ports of Suez or Aden, and a valuable site for the establishment of a dockyard. Unluckily, however, the Portuguese had since 1515 held the island trading centre of Hormoz, and thus commanded the straits opening from the Gulf into the Arabian Sea, and a less exposed passage to the southern coast of Safavid Iran and the fabled lands of the East.

In 1552 the veteran seaman Piri Reis set out from Suez with instructions to take both Hormoz and Bahrain, centre of the pearling industry and another Portuguese possession. He captured the city of Hormoz but a ship carrying essential equipment was lost and he was left without the means to prevail against the fortress. He cut short his expedition, looted the nearby island of Qeshm, and sailed with his booty to Basra.⁶⁹ The career of Piri Reis had flourished under the patronage of İbrahim Pasha; but İbrahim Pasha was long dead, and Piri Reis was no longer able to convince those in ruling circles of the value of his contribution. His failure in this mission led to execution, an untimely end for one of the greatest men of the age and a further demonstration of Süleyman’s readiness to be ruthless when he deemed it necessary.

Soon after Piri Reis’s execution, the Ottomans created the province of Lahsa on the southern, Arabian, shore of the Gulf, to provide a land base to support naval efforts against the Portuguese, and in 1559 a combined land and sea operation was mounted from Lahsa and Basra to take Bahrain, whose ruler had vacillated for years between his powerful Ottoman and Portuguese neighbours. Sailing from Hormoz, the Portuguese fleet repulsed the Ottoman attack on the main Bahraini fortress of Manamah, but from the jaws of disaster the Ottomans were able to snatch the consolation of an agreement whereby both parties made a strategic withdrawal, and from 1562 envoys were exchanged. In the Persian Gulf as elsewhere compromise had been reached: the Portuguese continued to control the sea passage through the Gulf, and the Ottomans the onward caravan route overland to Aleppo.⁷⁰

Like the coasts of the Persian Gulf, those of the Red Sea are long and have few suitable anchorages. To maintain a presence in this inhospitable terrain was a daunting logistic challenge, and Ottoman jurisdiction, as in other peripheral zones of the empire, diminished rapidly outside a few strongholds. Their new province of Lahsa, for instance – like Yemen – was at first a ‘paper province’, where the Ottomans were under constant harassment from indigenous Arab tribes who were unused to strong central authority and prevented the Ottomans from exercising their rule in any meaningful way. They were realistic enough not to expect to do so, however; their claiming as provinces regions where imperial power made little impact on local life outside a restricted area was a gesture intended to order and classify the Ottoman world and provide a framework for its administration. The Ottomans were always fearful of becoming over-extended, and well aware of their inability to impose direct rule over the vast ‘empty’ hinter-lands of the limited territory they needed for strategic purposes.

The lands beyond the southern limit of Mamluk rule in Egypt – Asyut on the Nile – were also terra incognita. Between Asyut and the First Cataract south of Aswan lay Nubia, and beyond Nubia the sultanate of Funj; further south still was Abyssinia, largely Christian. In his report of 1525 on Portuguese activities in the Indian Ocean, the sea captain Selman Reis had recommended the establishment of Ottoman control in Abyssinia, ‘Habeş’ to the Ottomans – by which he meant the western coastal strip of the Red Sea, past the straits of Bab al-Mandab, and along the southern shore of the Gulf of Aden – in order to wrest control of the spice trade from the Portuguese. He remarked on the weakness of the tribes in the region, both Christian and Muslim, and also proposed the conquest of the land between the island-fortress of Suakin, held by the Ottomans since the 1520s, and the Nile entrepôt of Atbara, a centre for the ivory and gold trade. No action was taken at the time but in 1555, partly in response to Funj advances northwards, Ottoman policy changed. Özdemir Pasha, sub-governor of Yemen, who had formerly served the Mamluks, was in that year made governor of the notional province of Habeş, but a campaign up the Nile launched from Cairo failed when the troops refused to proceed beyond the First Cataract. Two years later, an army sailed from Suez to Suakin and thence south to Mits’iwa, the Red Sea port for the inland city of Asmara, which was captured by Özdemir Pasha and his troops. Although much delayed, Selman Reis’s objective of shutting the Portuguese out of the Red Sea was realized, and the Ottomans gained control of the customs dues on the valuable trade passing through their ports on its shores.⁷¹

The Ottomans had allies in their efforts to keep the Indian Ocean trade routes open. One of the most significant was the Muslim sultanate of Aceh in north-western Sumatra, a producer of pepper; when threatened by Portuguese expansionism, Aceh sought Ottoman military assistance. Ottoman troops were sent to aid the sultan against the Portuguese in 1537 and 1547, and in 1566 Aceh formally requested the protection of the Ottomans – the sultan considered the Ottoman sultan his suzerain, he said, and mentioned his name in the Friday prayer. By the next year, when an Ottoman fleet set out from Suez to aid Aceh, its ports were under Portuguese blockade; two ships laden with cannon and war matériel and five hundred men reached their destination, in a much-scaled-down version of what had been envisaged. Inadequate as it was to the task of expelling the Portuguese from these seas, the presence of this force – like Ottoman harassment in the Persian Gulf – demonstrated that the Portuguese could not act with impunity. This stout defence of their commercial interests by the Ottomans led to a recovery in the value of the spice trade passing through Egypt from the middle of the sixteenth century.⁷²

In 1547 Ivan IV was crowned ‘Tsar of all the Russias’ in the capital of his state of Muscovy, far across the steppelands north of the Black Sea, which were home to the freebooting Cossacks and various nomadic peoples who had moved west from Asia, and a volatile region where the Ottomans had aligned themselves with the Muslim Tatar khanate of the Crimea. Until the early years of the sixteenth century, the Crimean khanate had been a staunch ally of Muscovy in defending their mutual economic and territorial interests against Poland-Lithuania and its steppe allies. So, too, Ottoman and Muscovite economic interests were complementary and relations friendly: in 1498, Muscovite merchants were granted the right to trade freely in the Ottoman Empire. During Selim I’s reign envoys from both Muscovy and the Crimea conducted an active diplomatic campaign for favour in Istanbul as Muscovy competed for a share of Poland-Lithuania’s fur trade with the Ottomans, while the Tatars feared the encroachment of Muscovy into Muslim lands.⁷³Ivan’s coronation signalled to the Muslim Tatar khans of the steppe – the rulers of Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan, whose Genghisid lineage was superior to his own – that he was their equal.⁷⁴

Mutually advantageous Muscovite–Ottoman trade contacts continued until in 1552, only five years after his coronation, Ivan seized the khanate of Kazan on the river Volga and four years later took Astrakhan, whose capital of the same name lies on the Volga delta on the north-west coast of the Caspian Sea. The Muscovite princes had long intervened in the politics of Kazan and Astrakhan and Tsar Ivan IV was able to achieve the conquests of these khanates by supporting one warring local faction against another. The Ottomans allowed those they conquered to retain their religious practices – albeit within defined parameters – and only gradually imposed the full weight of their administration; Muscovite policy towards the first non-Christian, non-Slavic-speaking lands they annexed was uncompromising, since to come within the Muscovite embrace was above all to accept Orthodox Christianity. Attempts to force the conversion of their new Muslim subjects met local resistance, however, and on occasion Muscovite missionaries had to bow to complaints from the Ottomans and the Crimean khanate that they were undermining the Muslim faith.⁷⁵

The alliance of the Caucasian province of Shirvan with the Ottomans between the late 1540s and its reoccupation by Shah Tahmasp in 1551 had encouraged the Ottomans to think about their strategy in Transcaucasia, and the Muscovite conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan was the first tangible sign that the strategic interests of the Ottomans and Muscovy would not always be concordant. For Astrakhan to be in Muscovite hands cast a shadow over Ottoman prestige for it removed from the sultan’s protection the route passing through Astrakhan along which Sunni Muslim pilgrims from Central Asia travelled on their way to one of the Black Sea ports before continuing southwards to Mecca. The dockyard at Sinop on the Anatolian Black Sea coast soon stepped up construction of war-galleys to meet the incipient challenge to Ottoman influence on this frontier.⁷⁶

Five of Süleyman’s sons survived beyond the early years of his reign: Mustafa, born of the concubine Mahidevran, and Mehmed, Selim, Bayezid and Cihangir, all born of Hürrem Sultan. Mehmed, the eldest son of Hürrem, was considered by contemporaries to be his father’s favourite, but he died prematurely in 1543, probably of smallpox. In a break with tradition he was buried in Istanbul rather than Bursa, the usual resting-place for princes. His tomb is in the garden of the Şehzade mosque complex, built by Süleyman in his memory, the earliest important commission entrusted to Sinan, the great Ottoman architect of the sixteenth century. The rich architectural and decorative repertoire with which Sinan experimented here became more restrained later in his master’s reign.⁷⁷

In 1553 Süleyman’s eldest son Prince Mustafa was executed in his late thirties. The first sultan to execute an adult son was Murad I in the late fourteenth century who caused the rebellious Savcı to be put to death. The official reason for Mustafa’s execution was that he was planning to usurp the throne but, as in the case of the execution of the Sultan’s favourite İbrahim Pasha, blame was laid at the door of Hürrem Sultan, who was suspected of conniving with her son-in-law and ally, the grand vezir Rüstem Pasha. It is not hard to imagine Hürrem going to any lengths to have her own son succeed his father, perhaps encouraging the ageing Sultan to suspect that Mustafa, a popular figure, would force him to step down – as Süleyman’s own father Selim I had his grandfather, Bayezid II. Following the death of Prince Mehmed some years earlier the standing army had indeed considered demanding Süleyman’s retirement to Didymoteicho, south of Edirne, in a close parallel with Bayezid’s fate.⁷⁸ Whatever Mustafa’s intentions may have been, Süleyman could carry out this summary act without compunction since he had other sons of whom none had a pre-ordained right to succeed to the throne. Mustafa was buried in Bursa and to appease the many critics of Süleyman’s peremptory action, Rüstem Pasha was temporarily dismissed from office. Prince Cihangir, Mustafa’s crippled half-brother, to whom he was especially close, soon died in Aleppo while campaigning against Iran. The mosque Süleyman built for him could easily be seen from the palace: much altered in appearance – thanks, most recently, to reconstruction in the late nineteenth century by Sultan Abdülhamid II – it still perches on the side of the hill in the Cihangir quarter across the water from the old city of Istanbul.

The despatch of Prince Mustafa did not bring Süleyman’s family troubles to an end for, as had happened before, a pretender arose in his place, a ‘pseudo-Mustafa’ who headed an uprising in the Balkans. Writing from Istanbul in July 1556, Ferdinand’s ambassador, Baron Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq – who was involved in the protracted negotiations for a peace in Hungary – reported that Süleyman and Hürrem’s son Prince Bayezid, her favourite, was suspected of having instigated the revolt. Pseudo-Mustafa and his followers were captured and brought to Istanbul, where they were put to death on the Sultan’s orders. Hürrem Sultan managed to avert the consequences of Bayezid’s supposed involvement⁷⁹ but in 1558 she died. Without her moderating influence on their ambitions, open conflict broke out between Bayezid and his remaining brother, Selim.

Süleyman, apparently fearing a coup, sent Bayezid and Selim to govern distant provinces. Selim was transferred from his favourable appointment in Manisa to Konya, further from Istanbul. Bayezid was moved from his post as military commander at Edirne to Amasya, where Prince Mustafa had been before him. He was the last prince-governor appointed to serve there, for the practice of giving a prospective sultan experience of kingship in the governing of a province had fallen into abeyance by the end of the century. Bayezid understood that the contest to succeed Süleyman had begun in earnest and, as he crossed north Anatolia to Amasya, attracted to his side an army of the disaffected – provincial cavalrymen and irregulars, as well as tribesmen of south-east Anatolia – numbering some thousands of men, many of whom had been partisans of his brother Mustafa.⁸⁰

Concerned lest Bayezid might attract support from Iran, Süleyman sought juridical opinion as to whether it was lawful to kill him,⁸¹ and ordered the governors of the Anatolian provinces to mobilize their troops around Selim; he promised them substantial pay rises, and speedy promotion to any who would enlist. The opposing armies met near Konya, Selim’s the larger and better-equipped. On the second day Bayezid fled the field towards Amasya, where he still commanded support. Despite the peace agreed with the Sultan in 1555, Shah Tahmasp offered him asylum in Iran. On hearing of this, Süleyman sent the governors of his border provinces orders to detain Bayezid but again had to resort to inducements to gain their co-operation. In July 1559, with four of his sons, Bayezid fled eastwards to Iran.⁸² To the last he hoped for forgiveness, but Süleyman had been unmoved by his appeals. In desperation, Bayezid had addressed himself to Grand Vezir Rüstem Pasha:

By God the great and munificent, from the very beginning I contracted and swore to His Excellency, the illustrious and felicitous padiŞah, who is the refuge of the world, that I did not intend [to bring] revolt and opposition and harm and ruin to the realm; I previously repented and asked from the bottom of my heart [for] God’s forgiveness, acknowledging my offence [which occurred in] a malign fit of rage; I repeatedly sent apologetic letters requesting forgiveness and favour and then undertook and swore not to oppose the noble pleasure.⁸³

Bayezid’s asylum at Tahmasp’s court appeared to the Shah a fitting revenge for Süleyman’s use of his brother Alqas Mirza against him in 1547. Selim was intimately involved in the attempt to get Bayezid back and over the course of the next three years seven Ottoman delegations travelled to the Safavid court charged with persuading Tahmasp to give up the prince; in 1562 he finally succumbed, agreeing to trade Bayezid and his sons for quantities of gold coin and sumptuous gifts, of which a decorated sword, a dagger, a belt, a chestnut horse and five Arab stallions would be presented to him when Selim received news that Bayezid and his sons were transferred into the custody of his envoys. But before this could happen they were murdered at Tahmasp’s capital of Qazvin by a trusted henchman of Selim and their bodies handed over instead. In stark contrast to the posthumous favour shown to his elder brother Mehmed, the rebel Bayezid and his sons were buried outside the walls of the provincial Anatolian town of Sivas.⁸⁴

The equilibrium achieved in Ottoman–Safavid relations with the Amasya treaty of 1555 lasted until 1578, and even Shah Tahmasp’s offer of refuge to Prince Bayezid did not upset it. The Ottomans could settle their relations with foreign powers by treaty but they were never able entirely to stamp out domestic disaffection and unrest – whether religiously-inspired or not.

When he came to the throne Süleyman had proclaimed that his reign would be an era of justice, but in 1526–7 Anatolia had erupted in widespread rebellion. The immediate cause of this uprising was a survey undertaken for the purpose of assessing tax revenues in Cilicia, which was perceived by the local population as inequitable. Provincial forces proved unequal to the task of putting down the disorder and reinforcements were brought in from Diyarbakır, but the revolt spread widely in eastern Anatolia and took on overtly political–religious overtones with a call to arms issued by Kalender Shah, a Kalenderi dervish and spiritual descendant of the revered thirteenth-century mystic Hacı BektaŞ. Ordering their escape route to Iran to be blocked, Süleyman sent the grand vezir İbrahim Pasha himself against the rebels whom, while he was still riding east, Ottoman forces succeeded in scattering at the cost of the lives of several provincial sub-governors who were among those killed on 8 June 1527 in a skirmish near Tokat in north-central Anatolia. In late June İbrahim Pasha and his army encountered the rebels and crushed them.⁸⁵

Less violent forms of non-conformity were also stamped upon. In 1527 an opinion of Sheikhulislam Kemalpaşazade, the supreme religious authority in the empire, brought the death penalty for a scholar, Molla Kabiz, who had argued from the Koran and from traditions ascribed to the Prophet that Jesus was spiritually superior to Muhammad. Listening to the preliminary interrogation of Kabiz from behind a grille in the imperial council chamber, Sultan Süleyman remonstrated with İbrahim Pasha for having brought a heretic into his presence. Kabiz refused to renounce his beliefs, and after further interrogation he was executed.⁸⁶ Kemalpaşazade gave a similar opinion in 1529 in the case of a young preacher named Sheikh Ismail Maşuki whose ideas enjoyed wide popular support. Among them was the mystical doctrine of the ‘oneness of being’, that man was God, the doctrine espoused by Sheikh Bedreddin during the years of civil war a century earlier. It had been considered highly subversive by Sultan Mehmed I, and Sultan Süleyman’s religious authorities found it equally unsettling. Like Sheikh Bedreddin Maşuki was charged with heresy, and executed with twelve of his acolytes in the Hippodrome. Popular opinion saw him as a martyr, and the activities of his followers were still vexing the Ottoman authorities thirty years later.⁸⁷

The notion of how far religious expression must depart from officially-sanctioned belief and practice to constitute a heresy is decided by those holding power, not by the ‘heretics’ themselves. The Ottoman state defined certain beliefs as ‘heretical’, considering them liable to have adverse political consequences, and by the same token could be lenient when the political consequences were deemed insignificant. Thus, as the territorial struggle between the Ottoman and Safavid states abated for the time being, the KızılbaŞ‘heresy’ was no longer a problem that demanded military action against a neighbour but one that was gradually redefined as an internal matter. Following Süleyman’s eastern campaign of 1533–5 there had been significant KızılbaŞ migration into Iran, while those who remained within Ottoman frontiers were persecuted. The judicial opinion of Sheikhulislam Ebüssuud, KemalpaŞazade’s successor from 1545 until 1574, was that they were apostates, the canonical penalty for whom was death – Kemalpaşazade’s opinion regarding Maşuki’s preachings was also supported by Ebüssuud Efendi.⁸⁸ In its effort to impose an officially-sanctioned form of Islam, the Ottoman establishment allowed domestic dissenters no quarter.

During the early part of his reign Sultan Süleyman relied for counsel solely on İbrahim Pasha and Hürrem Sultan. After İbrahim Pasha’s execution Hürrem continued to be her husband’s intimate confidante, together with their daughter Mihrimah, wife of Rüstem Pasha, who was grand vezir from 1544 almost without interruption until 1561. Rüstem Pasha’s position as the Sultan’s son-in-law gave him great power and he made many enemies. He understood the workings of the palace better than had İbrahim Pasha, and although he was implicated with Hürrem in the execution of Prince Mustafa he merely spent a brief period out of office to appease the supporters of the late prince before being reinstated. He went on to gain a reputation for increasing the revenues of the state by manipulating the coinage and the grain market, and selling offices. He amassed a huge personal fortune, and it was said by his contemporaries that the practice of taking bribes became the norm during his period in office.⁸⁹ When Rüstem died he was buried in theŞehzade mosque complex built to commemorate Süleyman’s son Mehmed, a clear acknowledgement of the regard in which Süleyman held him.

As a rich man Rüstem Pasha could afford to be a generous patron, and he funded the construction of many mosques and other sacred and secular buildings across the empire, usually employing the skills of the architect Sinan, chief imperial architect from 1538. Rüstem’s own mosque is in Eminönü, the main port district of Istanbul on the Golden Horn. With land at a premium and rents high, an existing church-turned-mosque was demolished and Sinan designed Rüstem’s mosque above a ground floor of shops. The accompanying religious college had to be built some distance away, on the slope above the port, while a caravansaray was constructed across the Golden Horn in the commercial district of Galata, where there were also rich profits to be made. Rüstem also built large caravansarays on the main Anatolian trade routes at Erzurum and at Ereğli, near Konya, as well as two in Thrace.⁹⁰

It was under Rüstem Pasha’s aegis that ‘classical’ Ottoman art and architecture reached its fullest expression. As the master-craftsmen brought back from his conquests by Selim I died their influence waned, to be replaced with that of men recruited through the youth-levy and educated specifically to serve the Ottoman house. A regular system of recruitment and promotion was introduced and artistic expression – whether on textiles and tiles or in calligraphic decoration – became more standardized as a result. Where once the subtle, abstract designs of the Iranian canon had predominated, under the influence of a more consciously orthodox Islam, the bold stylized depiction of mostly plant designs, endlessly and repeatedly blended, now held sway. Except in miniature painting, representation of humans became rare.⁹¹ Rüstem Pasha’s mosque in Eminönü is famous for the sumptuousness and variety of its tiles, in cobalt blue, turquoise, green and tomato red under a transparent glaze – among the finest products of the workshops at İznik, across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul, which for more than a century produced tiles for the court.

Situated prominently on the spine of the hill overlooking the Golden Horn, the Süleymaniye mosque complex, built during Rüstem Pasha’s tenure of office, was a fittingly imposing monument to the sultan of an orthodox Islamic empire.⁹² As he became more pious in his later years, Süleyman depended on Sheikhulislam Ebüssuud to convey a sober image of the Ottoman dynasty, one considered appropriate to an Islamic world power within more or less fixed frontiers. This image of himself and his empire was not to be that of a swashbuckling conqueror like his grandfather Mehmed II, ruler of a predominantly Christian state, but rather one that would appeal to his Muslim subjects in the old Islamic lands of Egypt and Syria and the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the earlier years of his own reign, when under the auspices of İbrahim Pasha the image of empire promoted was directed at Charles V, the Safavids were now the target – albeit less aggressively – as they had been in his father’s time. Ebüssuud was an adept associate in the quest to harmonize the claims of the Ottoman dynasty to temporal power with those to leadership of the Islamic world.⁹³

Although Selim I had given no prominence to the title of caliph, the guardianship of the Islamic Holy Places which followed Selim’s conquest of the Mamluk lands seemed to Ebüssuud to require that the sultan assume it in its full meaning. Tradition demanded that the caliph be descended from the Qurayshi tribe to which the Prophet Muhammad had belonged, but this did not trouble Ebüssuud: he simply fabricated a basis for a claim that the Ottomans were connected to the Qurayshi. To give further weight to this sleight-of-hand, he announced that the title was hereditary. Ebüssuud was able to find support in the work of historians: already in Selim I’s reign, Mehmed Neşri had portrayed the dynasty as heirs to the Prophet, while Süleyman’s grand vezir from 1539 to 1541, Lutfi Pasha, writing in the 1540s, emphasized that the Ottoman sultans were the only true upholders of orthodoxy.⁹⁴ A grandiloquent inscription placed over the portal of the Süleymaniye mosque – quoted at the beginning of this chapter – immortalized Süleyman’s claim to be caliph.

Ebüssuud is also credited with bringing the dynastic law of the state, kânûn (from which derives Süleyman’s Turkish soubriquet, Kanuni), into conformity with sacred law, shari‘a. While dynastic or secular law relied to a great extent on principles derived from customary practice and originated with the sultans, sacred law does (and did) not concern itself primarily with practical matters but with the discovery of the Law of God as revealed through the Koran and the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions; its practitioners, or jurists, sought to accomplish this by the exercise of reasoning and interpretation in the discussion of theoretical problems, or jurisprudence. The practical matters dealt with in the sacred law include the ritual obligations of Muslims – rules for the conduct of prayer and fasting – specific areas of penal justice and the regulation and maintenance of equilibrium in society according to established criteria principally based on the dichotomies between male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, and free man and slave (individuals falling into the second of each of these categories are assigned a subordinate but clearly-defined legal status).⁹⁵

There were thus whole areas of complex administrative practice in the Ottoman state over which sacred law had no jurisdiction. Mehmed II had been the first to codify a body of dynastic law based on the practices of preceding sultans. Süleyman’s general law-code proclaimed around 1540 was a revision and amplification of those of Mehmed II and Bayezid II, containing legislative principles for the empire as a whole on matters such as the regulation of the provincial cavalry forces, taxation (the Ottoman Empire derived the major part of its revenue from agricultural taxes) and the affairs of the minority population;⁹⁶ Süleyman also continued his predecessors’ work of creating law-codes for newly-conquered territories. A state with an expanding bureaucracy to regulate its workings needed an up-to-date law to fit the times, and Ebüssuud strove to harmonize the new regulatory machinery of the Ottoman Empire with the precepts of the much older, and superior, sacred law.

Regularization of the laws of the empire was accompanied by a reorganization of the religious establishment whose members also acted as judges arbitrating matters relating to both sacred and dynastic law. In Süleyman’s time the religious establishment was expanded, and its career structure regularized to provide the many well-trained men needed to staff the legal and religious offices of the empire. Süleyman’s claim that the Ottoman Empire was the one true Islamic state required consistency in the implementation of law and in the statement of religious doctrine, both to counter the attractions of the ‘heretical’ Safavids and to assign to his non-Muslim subjects their allotted place within the Islamic legal structure. The sheikhulislam, also known as the müfti, had been merely the chief religious authority in Istanbul; his status was now enhanced so that he became head of the whole religious establishment, and the supreme religious figure in the state. His new responsibilities came to include the time-consuming and highly-charged business of rewards and appointments within the religious hierarchy, however, and his proximity to infighting within the body of which he was himself a product made him more rather than less vulnerable to political currents and set at nought any expectations of impartiality. In seeking legal opinions from the sheikhulislam across a wide range of issues Süleyman and his advisers intended a further consolidation of the sultan’s legitimacy as supreme Muslim sovereign; they found instead that they had initiated the politicization of the office.⁹⁷

The third senior functionary to leave his mark on the period of Süleyman’s maturity was his chancellor, Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi. Celalzade Mustafa accompanied İbrahim Pasha to Egypt in 1525 as secretary of the imperial council – he probably prepared the Egyptian law-code⁹⁸ – and served as chancellor for more than twenty years from the time of the execution of İbrahim Pasha in 1536. He worked with Ebüssuud to reconcile dynastic and sacred law, establishing the chancellor as the chief authority on dynastic law. He also professionalized the bureaucracy so that, as in the religious and artistic establishments, candidates would undergo training in order to proceed up the hierarchy.⁹⁹ As Ebüssuud was taken as a model for future holders of the office of sheikhulislam, so Celalzade Mustafa was considered the epitome of chancellors.

Celalzade Mustafa was also author of a monumental history of Süleyman’s reign up to 1557, when he was forced from office by Rüstem Pasha. His work set a new tone in the presentation of the sultan and the dynasty, depicting Süleyman first and foremost as the sober ruler of a just and mature order,¹⁰⁰ a representation of the ideal monarch which tended to become ritualized after the creation of the post of court historiographer. The verse-form panegyric it was the historiographer’s task to compose had its roots in the Iranian tradition of portraying the ruler as an epic hero which pervaded Ottoman court culture through the work of highly accomplished emigrés such as the first court historiographer ‘Arifi Fethullah Çelebi, who had come to Istanbul at the time of the revolt of Shah Tahmasp’s brother Alqas Mirza in 1548–9. As the sultan’s right to be identified as the ruler of an Islamic empire was publicly exemplified in religious architecture and good works and in the execution of dynastic law, so his image was honed in the historical works of the time for the benefit of the few who could afford to commission them or might chance to read or listen to recitation of them – in the absence of printing these historical works could circulate only among the rich and powerful. Their loyalty could not always be guaranteed, any more than that of the poor and illiterate, and it was necessary that they too be convinced of the sultan’s inalienable right to rule. Another of Süleyman’s concerns in creating the post of court historiographer was the rehabilitation of his father, whose reputation for ruthlessness did not fit the image of the ideal Muslim ruler, and to this end he commissioned a number of works specifically extolling Selim’s deeds; by the end of the century, Selim was duly accepted as a heroic rather than a cruel figure.¹⁰¹ Writing in the early years of Süleyman’s reign, his sheikhulislam Kemalpasazade composed an elegy on Selim which was a precursor of the genre; it begins:

He, an old man in prudence, a youth in might;

His sword aye triumphant, his word ever right.

Like Asef [i.e. Solomon’s vezir] in wisdom, the pride of his host;

He needed no vezir, no mushir [i.e. a general] in fight.

His hand was a sabre; a dagger, his tongue;

His finger an arrow; his arm, a spear bright.

In shortest of time, many high deeds he wrought;

Encircle the world did the shade of his might.¹⁰²

The Ottomans became masters of the manipulation of symbolism in bolstering their claims to supremacy. Mehmed II had codified court ritual and laid down strict rules for the comportment of palace and governmental officials; Süleyman took this to its logical conclusion. No longer would the sultan eat with his courtiers, nor accept petitions personally as a matter of course. Mehmed often observed meetings of the imperial council through a latticed window high in the wall of the chamber, rather than attending them in person; Süleyman made this the rule rather than the exception. He emphasized the inferior position of visiting ambassadors by not rising to greet them; they subsequently remarked on his silence and immobility as he received them in his Hall of Petitions.¹⁰³Süleyman rarely appeared before his people; when he did – attending Friday prayers or marching to war – the event was carefully staged to enhance the mystique surrounding him.

Conquests could not be made indefinitely, and in the second half of his reign the feasts and triumphal progresses of Süleyman’s early years were replaced as symbols of the dynasty’s greatness by the more permanent legacy of bricks and mortar. For the first time, royal women joined the sultan and his statesmen in demonstrating their piety to the people of Istanbul: three of the six mosque complexes erected by members of the dynasty in the capital during Süleyman’s reign are associated with women – previously they had built only in the provinces. Compared with his predecessors, Süleyman’s own programme of sacred and secular building – from mosque complexes to aqueducts – was extensive. There were those who regarded such lavish public expenditure with suspicion – the late-sixteenth-century bureaucrat and intellectual Mustafa Ali of Gelibolu remarked that the need for public services in a particular place was not a consideration when a decision was taken regarding pious works: what was important, he said, was that new foundations be funded by booty rather than from the public purse.¹⁰⁴

The projects undertaken by the royal women of Süleyman’s family were more charitable than commercial in character, including elements such as a hospital or a public kitchen, not always found in the foundations sponsored by male members of the dynasty. In the town of Manisa where she had lived with Süleyman when he was prince-governor of Saruhan his mother Hafsa Sultan built an extensive complex with a staff of more than a hundred people. Besides a mosque there was a theological college, a dervish lodge, a primary school, and a public kitchen to feed the poor; Süleyman later added a hospital and bath-house.¹⁰⁵ For Süleyman’s daughter Mihrimah Sultan the imperial architect Sinan built a mosque complex with a clinic and a public kitchen by the landing-stage at Üsküdar, across the Bosporus from Istanbul and the first stop along the road to war in Anatolia, and another on a high terrace next to the Edirne Gate of Istanbul through which the imperial army marched on the road to war in Europe.

Hürrem Sultan’s foundations – some built at her personal instigation, others merely in her name – ensured that many thousands would have access to her philanthropy and thus be grateful for her concern (and that of the dynasty) for their well-being. They were situated at key sites in the empire: in the seats of the dynasty in Istanbul and Edirne, in the Muslim Holy Places and in Jerusalem. The earliest was the complex in Istanbul built for her by Sinan between 1537 and 1539; it was his largest commission to date and the first mosque complex sponsored by a royal woman to be built in Istanbul. The construction of a mosque complex in Hürrem’s name so soon after the execution of İbrahim Pasha in 1536 was doubtless intended to improve her image; it included a public kitchen and a hospital. Shortly before her death in 1558 Sinan built a large double bath bearing her name at the edge of the Hippodrome, next to the wall of Ayasofya.

Hürrem’s foundation in Jerusalem was the most splendid of all, consisting of a mosque, a 55-room lodging-house for pilgrims, a bakery, a public kitchen, a cellar, a granary, a woodshed, a refectory, toilets, an inn and stables.¹⁰⁶ Inherited, like Mecca and Medina, by the Ottomans from the Mamluks, Jerusalem was the place from where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended into heaven. Between 1537 and 1541 Süleyman redecorated the Dome of the Rock mosque – built at the end of the seventh century – in the Ottoman manner, and extensively rebuilt the old city walls.¹⁰⁷

After the Ottomans became protectors of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina they continued the Mamluk practice of embellishing these sites. The Mamluks had jealously guarded their suzerainty here and refused to allow rival Islamic rulers the privilege of making donations, for fear that this would lend them greater prestige. They had rejected the gifts of Tamerlane’s son and successor Shah-Rukh as they had Sultan Mehmed II’s offer of a covering for the Ka‘ba shrine. Selim I had had little time to demonstrate his respect for the Holy Places but Süleyman undertook extensive renovations. In Mecca he built four theological schools and rebuilt the minarets of the Great mosque, adding a seventh of great height. He also repaired the water supply: the number of visitors had increased and the provision of clean and plentiful water for ablutions and drinking was more essential than ever. Süleyman also donated large wax candles for the illumination of the mosque during evening prayers, and perfumes for the Ka‘ba.¹⁰⁸ In both Mecca and Medina he caused to be built a public kitchen in Hürrem Sultan’s name.

The reaction of the Ottomans to the sacred monuments of Christendom they inherited was competition, not destruction, as exemplified by Mehmed II’s construction of his own mosque in Istanbul to vie with the Orthodox Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia. Its association with the life of the Prophet apart, the attention Süleyman lavished on Jerusalem might seem out of proportion to the importance of what was in effect a small provincial town, but here he could advertise his splendour to a diverse audience. The public works he and Hürrem Sultan sponsored served to inform Muslim observers that Jerusalem was now an Ottoman city, albeit one that owed a debt to the Islamic rulers of the past. They would have been noticed also by the Christian pilgrims who travelled there at an average of almost six hundred each year over the next century¹⁰⁹ – but if the French ambassador M. d’Aramon is typical, they thought little of Süleyman’s improvements. When he visited Palestine in 1548 in connection with the difficulties then being experienced by the Franciscans in the Christian Holy Sites, the impressions of his party were less than favourable:

Jerusalem has been enclosed by city walls built by the Turks, but there are neither ramparts nor a ditch. The town is medium-sized and not much populated, the streets are narrow and unpaved . . . The so-called temple of Solomon is at the base of the city . . . round and with a lead-covered dome; around its core are chapels as in our churches, which is all one can surmise because no Christian is permitted to enter without threat of death or having to become a [Muslim].¹¹⁰

For Venetian ambassadors Süleyman was still as ‘Magnificent’ at the end of his reign as at the beginning but in different ways. His personal display was now muted to a pious sobriety befitting a sultan who aspired to be the embodiment of justice; his magnificence had become more impersonal, advertised in building works and moral acts. Süleyman’s reign soon came to be regarded as the golden age of the empire (a judgement until recently accepted uncritically by historians), with the corollary that what followed could be considered as nothing more than a decline from this apogee: Ottoman men of letters writing during the century after Süleyman dwelt nostalgically on the justice he had brought to the land, which they perceived to have been vitiated thereafter by corrupt statesmen and administrators. Yet while they idealized his reign as a time of order, there were some, nevertheless, who saw policies adopted by his government as containing within them the seeds of discord. Among his critics was Lutfi Pasha, who even while Süleyman was still on the throne voiced his concerns about widespread bribery, excessive military spending and the infiltration of peasants into the military class.¹¹¹ As grand vezir himself under Süleyman, Lutfi Pasha must have witnessed the Sultan’s retreat from government – and disapproved. He advised the Sultan not to allow his courtiers to meddle in state affairs: administering the state was, he said, the business of the sultan and his grand vezir. One of the inevitable consequences of sultanic withdrawal from public affairs was foreseen by the janissaries, who in 1558 complained of Süleyman that ‘He cannot know anything about anyone by living within four walls. He places all his confidence in a host of despots . . . he is unaware of the condition of the people’.¹¹²

The death in 1564 of King Ferdinand, who had succeeded his brother Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1558, and the accession of his energetic son Maximilian II, rekindled Ottoman–Habsburg hostilities. The immediate pretext for a new campaign was Maximilian’s failure to pay the tribute he owed the Sultan. In his mid-sixties, and after an interval of eleven years, Sultan Süleyman decided to lead his army in person again. Possibly his decision owed something to the chiding of his daughter Mihrimah Sultan, who told him he was neglecting his canonical obligation to lead his army in holy war against the infidel.¹¹³ Accompanied by Grand Vezir Sokullu Mehmed Pasha, in the spring of 1566 he marched west for the first time in 23 years. Four hours before dawn on 7 September Süleyman died under the walls of the fortress of Szigetvár in southern Hungary which his army had been besieging for a month. Szigetvár fell the next day and the area to the south of Lake Balaton was occupied.

As had often been the fate of campaigning sultans, Süleyman I died far from his capital. Only one of his sons survived him, but Selim was at his post as prince-governor in Kütahya in Anatolia: it was not the fear of a succession struggle among brothers that alarmed Sokullu Mehmed Pasha, therefore, but the possibility that a vacuum at the heart of government might excite the ambitions of claimants outside the Ottoman dynasty. Ignoring the Islamic stricture that burial and the formalities preceding it must be carried out as soon as possible, Sokullu Mehmed conducted an elaborate ruse to keep Süleyman’s death a secret until Selim could be proclaimed sultan. Summoning him to travel with all haste from Kütahya, the Grand Vezir continued to conduct state business in Süleyman’s name, and the letters of victory relating the fall of Hungarian fortresses to the Ottoman army were sent out as though his master were alive. The Sultan’s customary attendance at Friday prayers in a hastily-erected mosque was proclaimed to the army, and his subsequent non-appearance on the pretext of his gout provoked little reaction. When bureaucrats began arriving at Szigetvár from Istanbul the troops and their officers in Hungary began to suspect that something was amiss, but Sokullu Mehmed was able, for a time, to maintain the ruse.¹¹⁴

* Meaning that Süleyman was wise; Süleyman is the Ottoman version of Solomon.

* The palace, somewhat altered, today houses the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art.

* A turban reputed to have been that of Abu Hanifa was on display in the treasury of Topkapı Palace in the early years of the seventeenth century (Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power 141).