Who was Suleiman the Magnificent?
Suleiman the Magnificent was the Ottoman sultan under whom the empire reached its height. He took Belgrade and Rhodes, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529, though the city held. He also reformed and codified Ottoman law, so later generations called him Kanuni, the Lawgiver.
Under Suleiman the Magnificent the Ottoman Empire reached the height of its power, wealth and splendor. In a reign of nearly half a century he pushed its borders deep into Europe and across the Mediterranean, shattered the kingdom of Hungary, and besieged Vienna itself. His Western contemporaries called him the Magnificent; later generations remembered him as Kanuni, the Lawgiver.1
Early life
Suleiman was born in Trabzon on the Black Sea, on 6 November 1494 according to the Turkish Encyclopaedia of Islam (TDV), though Britannica allows a window from November 1494 to April 1495. He was the only son of Selim I, the conqueror of Syria and Egypt, and of Hafsa Sultan. He grew up at his father's provincial court in Trabzon, where his first known teacher was Hayreddin Efendi.2
Like every Ottoman prince he learned to govern by governing. Under his grandfather Bayezid II he was made governor of Kaffa (Kefe) in the Crimea in 1509, and under his father he held Manisa in western Asia Minor from 1513, for about seven years. When Selim died in September 1520, there were no brothers to fight: Suleiman reached Üsküdar and took the throne on 30 September 1520.3
Rise: the march into Europe
Coming to the throne in 1520, Suleiman struck at once into Europe. He took the great fortress of Belgrade in 1521 and the island of Rhodes, held by the Knights Hospitaller, in 1522, clearing the way for a drive up the Danube against the kingdom of Hungary, the shield of central Europe.4
Rhodes was the harder prize. The fleet sailed from Istanbul on 4 June 1522, and the Knights of St. John held out behind their walls until 20 December, when they surrendered on terms. The TDV account records that the sultan met the grand master, Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and let the Knights leave the island; Britannica dates the fall to the winter of 1522 and 1523. With Belgrade and Rhodes taken, the two outposts that had defied Mehmed II were both in Ottoman hands.5
Campaigns
In 1526, on the plain of Mohács, Suleiman's guns and janissaries destroyed the Hungarian army in about two hours of fighting; its king died as he fled the field, and the kingdom lay open. Three years later he carried the war to the walls of Vienna, but the city held. After 17 days, with his army worn down by rain, cold and failed assaults and the season far advanced, he lifted the siege in mid-October, the first check to his advance. On his northern flank he chose peace: in 1533 he concluded a "perpetual peace" with King Sigismund I the Old of Poland, which spared Poland's southeastern frontier a major Ottoman war for decades.6
Mohács did not end the Hungarian question; it opened it. The vacant crown was claimed both by the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand and by John Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania, and Suleiman backed John as his vassal king. The 1529 march on Vienna was meant to end Habsburg interference at one blow. A second great campaign in 1532 stalled before the small fortress of Güns (Kőszeg), whose defense Britannica calls brilliant, and the Habsburg field army never came out to fight; in 1533 the sultan granted Ferdinand a truce.7
The East pulled him the other way. In his first war with Safavid Persia, in 1534 and 1535, he entered Tabriz and on 30 November 1534 Baghdad, where he wintered, and the conquest of Iraq rounded off his father's work. Two more Persian campaigns followed, in 1548 to 1549, which won the country around Lake Van, and in 1554 to 1555, which showed how hard the Safavids were to subdue; the first formal Ottoman-Safavid peace was signed in 1555.8
When John Zápolya died in 1540 and Austrian troops advanced again, Suleiman changed his policy in Hungary. He entered Buda on 2 September 1541 and made it the seat of an Ottoman province; by his campaigns of 1541 and 1543 the old kingdom was cut into three, a Habsburg strip in the north and west, Ottoman Hungary along the middle Danube and a vassal Transylvania. A peace recognizing that division was signed in 1562.9
At sea, his admiral Khayr al-Din Barbarossa defeated the combined fleets of Venice and Spain under Andrea Doria off Preveza on 28 September 1538, giving the Ottomans the naval initiative in the Mediterranean until Lepanto in 1571. Britannica lists the rest of the naval record: Tripoli taken in 1551, a Spanish expedition crushed at Djerba in 1560, a failed attempt on Diu in India in 1538, and the failure before Malta in 1565.10
Character and command style
Those who met him describe a reserved, self-controlled man. The TDV article cites a Venetian envoy of 1520 who found the young sultan tall, slim and gentle. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador who knew him in his last years, wrote of his "majestic bearing" and called him "a careful and temperate man" who drank no wine even in youth and was "most strict" in upholding his religion.11
He ruled through able ministers and leaned on them heavily. His companion İbrahim, raised from household servant to grand vizier, was his closest collaborator for more than a decade, until the sultan had him executed in the palace in March 1536. He married Hürrem, a concubine of the harem, breaking with Ottoman custom, and Busbecq noted that he stayed faithful to her. Both Busbecq and the Oxford account record the darker side: in 1553 he had his eldest son Mustafa executed on suspicion of rebellion, a decision Busbecq's informants blamed on Hürrem's influence, and in 1561 his son Bayezid was put to death after losing a war of succession to his brother Selim.12
As a commander he led in person, campaigning from Belgrade to Baghdad, and he died in the field. He was a planner rather than a gambler, willing to withdraw from Vienna or settle for a truce when distance, weather and supply ran against him. Busbecq reports that Vienna stayed with him as an open wound, and that the sultan set his heart on three things: finishing his mosque, restoring the aqueducts of Constantinople, and taking Vienna. He achieved the first two.13
The Lawgiver
Suleiman was more than a conqueror. His work on the empire's laws, bringing the sultan's dynastic law into harmony with Islamic law, is why he is remembered as Kanuni, the Lawgiver, though the name took hold only long after his death: the TDV traces it to Dimitrie Cantemir's history of the empire in the 18th century. He presided over a golden age of architecture, poetry and art, and for him the great architect Sinan built the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, completed in 1557. He wrote some 3,000 poems in Turkish and Persian himself, mostly under the pen name Muhibbi, and was a patron of the poet Bâkî.14
Death and legacy
Suleiman died in 1566, old and ill with gout, on campaign in Hungary: he died in his camp at the siege of Szigetvár on the night of 6 to 7 September, just before the fortress fell. His death was kept from the army; orders went out in his name until his son Selim could be reached, and it was announced only near Belgrade, where a funeral prayer was said. He was buried in Istanbul in a tomb beside the Süleymaniye, near that of Hürrem.15
He left the empire far larger than he had found it; his reign of 46 years, the longest of any Ottoman sultan, is remembered as the Ottoman golden age. Britannica credits him with completing the transformation of Byzantine Constantinople into Istanbul, a worthy capital for a great Turkish and Islamic empire, and with adorning Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad with mosques, bridges and aqueducts.16
See his great victory at Mohács, his father Selim I, or meet the other great commanders of the Ottoman Empire.
