Süleyman I became sultan on the 30th of September 1520, eight days after his father's death, at the age of twenty-five. He was tall, slight, pale-skinned, with a thin aquiline nose and (according to a Venetian ambassador's report from the same year) "an expression of greater intelligence than any monarch I have ever seen." He had been raised, like all Ottoman princes of his generation, in a provincial governorship — Caffa in the Crimea, then Manisa in western Anatolia — where he had learned administration, law, military command, and the Turkish, Persian, and Arabic literary traditions. He composed his own poetry under the pen name Muhibbi, "the loving one." Several thousand of his verses survive. They are, by the standards of the Ottoman divan tradition, very good.
The dynasty would call him Kanuni — the Lawgiver — for his domestic reforms. The Europeans, beginning with the Hapsburgs whose territory he attacked five times, called him the Magnificent. Both names captured something. He reigned for forty-six years, longer than any other Ottoman sultan. He directed thirteen major military campaigns, of which he personally led ten. He extended the empire to its greatest geographical extent. He codified the secular laws (the kanun) that would govern Ottoman state administration for the next three centuries. He patronised the building, in his lifetime, of more than four hundred mosques, hospitals, schools, fountains, and aqueducts. And he conducted, over four decades, the most consequential marriage in Ottoman history.
Hürrem Sultan
Süleyman's most consequential personal decision was to fall in love, deeply and irreversibly, with a slave woman in his harem. She was a Ruthenian (probably from what is now western Ukraine), seized by Crimean Tatar slavers as a teenager and sold into the harem of his Manisa governorate. She had been given the name Hürrem — "the joyful one." She was, according to all accounts, sharp, charming, and politically astute. By 1521 she was the sultan's favourite. By 1531 she was the mother of four of his surviving sons. In 1533 — breaking centuries of Ottoman practice — Süleyman formally married her, granting her legal status as his wife rather than concubine. By 1541 she had moved permanently into the Topkapı Palace, ending the older system by which the imperial concubines lived separately in the Old Palace. She would die there in 1558, eight years before her husband.
The political consequences of this marriage shaped the next century. By concentrating succession decisions in the central palace, Süleyman effectively created the institution that historians would later call the Sultanate of Women — the period from roughly 1540 to 1656 when imperial mothers and chief consorts held enormous political influence at court. By marrying a slave-born wife instead of contracting a foreign princess (which had been Mehmed II's instinct), he made the dynasty inward-turning, less diplomatically interlocked with foreign houses. By preferring Hürrem's sons over those of his first concubine Mahidevran, he set up the bloody fratricidal disputes that would mark the next several reigns.
The campaigns
Süleyman's military reputation rested on a series of striking victories in his first twenty years. In 1521 he took Belgrade, which had resisted Ottoman attacks for sixty years. In 1522 he took Rhodes after a six-month siege, expelling the Knights Hospitaller and removing the last Christian foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1526 he destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács in a single afternoon, killing King Louis II of Hungary, opening the central Danube to Ottoman penetration, and beginning a hundred-and-sixty-year occupation of central Hungary. In 1529 he laid siege to Vienna itself, the capital of the Habsburg empire, for the first time. The siege lasted two weeks. The Ottomans, weakened by autumn rains and overstretched logistics, withdrew without taking the city — but they had now demonstrated that they could reach as far west as a thousand miles from Istanbul.
In the east, Süleyman conducted three campaigns against the Safavids — in 1534-35, 1548-49, and 1554-55 — that took Baghdad permanently into Ottoman hands (1534), confirmed Ottoman control of Mesopotamia, and pushed the eastern frontier roughly to where the modern Iran-Iraq border still runs. The Treaty of Amasya of 1555, which ended the third war, was the first formal treaty between the Ottoman and Safavid states. Its terms held, with minor adjustments, for fifty years.
Sinan
The other defining figure of the Magnificent Century was not a sultan, a queen, or a soldier. He was the chief court architect. Mimar Sinan was born around 1490 in a Christian Anatolian village (probably Greek or Armenian), brought to Istanbul as a teenager through the devşirme, and trained in the Janissary engineering corps. He fought as a military engineer in Süleyman's Belgrade, Rhodes, Mohács, and Vienna campaigns. He was appointed chief court architect in 1538, at around forty-eight, and held the post for the next forty-nine years. He died in his late nineties, in 1588, and is buried in a small tomb of his own design near the entrance to the Süleymaniye complex.
What Sinan built, across his half-century of service to three sultans, would fill a thick illustrated book. He claimed, in his old age, to have completed three hundred and seventy-five major commissions: ninety-two large mosques, fifty-two smaller mosques, fifty-five madrasas, seven Quran schools, twenty mausoleums, seventeen public soup kitchens, three hospitals, six aqueducts, seven bridges, twenty caravanserais, thirty-five palaces, six storehouses, forty-eight bathhouses. Modern scholarly counts vary, but at least three hundred can be confidently attributed.
His three acknowledged masterpieces are the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul (1548), the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul (1557), and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1574). The Süleymaniye, the largest of the imperial mosques in Istanbul, was Sinan's "qualifying piece" — the structure he was satisfied with technically but not creatively. The Selimiye, built when he was in his eighties for Süleyman's son Selim II, he called his masterpiece. Its central dome, at over thirty-one metres in interior diameter, was the largest dome Sinan ever constructed; it is, structurally and aesthetically, the highest achievement of Ottoman architecture. It is also the most spatially radical building in Islamic architecture: the dome rests on eight piers concealed within the corners of the prayer hall, creating an open central space without internal columns. There is nothing else like it.
"I am God's slave and the slave of the Sultan. Whatever I have done has been by his command and grace. I have spent my life serving God and the dynasty. The Selimiye is my masterpiece. I leave it for those who come after." — Mimar Sinan, autobiography (Tezkiretü'l-Bünyan), c. 1580
The end of the reign
Süleyman died on the 7th of September 1566 — at the age of seventy-one — during the siege of Szigetvár, in southern Hungary. He had personally commanded the army on this his thirteenth campaign. His grand vizier, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, kept his death secret for forty-eight days while the army marched home, instructing the imperial physician to perform the daily routines as if the sultan were still alive. By the time the news was announced, the new sultan — Selim II, Süleyman and Hürrem's eldest surviving son — had been quietly installed in Istanbul.
The empire Süleyman left was, by any measure, the most powerful state in the Mediterranean world. Its population was around fifteen million. Its territory ran from Algiers to Basra. Its treasury was full. Its army was the largest in Europe and Asia combined. Its capital was the largest city in Europe by a substantial margin. Its imperial mosques were the architectural high point of Islamic civilization to that date.
What no one in 1566 yet understood was that the long century of expansion had ended. The next hundred and seventeen years, until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, would be a period of consolidation, of holding what was held, of occasional gains balanced by occasional losses, and of slow institutional decay beneath an outwardly intact surface. That is the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter IV