Dan Snow's History Hit - Suleyman the Magnificent

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

The Lion House is a riveting new book from journalist and historian Christopher De Bellaigue, written like a novel that tells the dramatic story of Suleyman the Magnificent and his power and influence over 16th-century Europe. In this episode recorded at the Chalke Valley History festival during the summer of 2022, Christopher talks Dan through what was happening at the opposite end of Europe to Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as this fearsome Sultan set his sights on swathes of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa and reigned over what became known as the 'Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire.'This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges. The audio editor was Dougal Patmore.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit, Suleiman the Magnificent. He ruled over the mighty Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. He was a contemporary with Henry VIII of England, Emperor Charles and King Francis of France. Four Renaissance princes doing their bit. And the reason I feel it's important that we put him in the bracket with the other three is that all too often we't, because of religion.

He was Islamic. He was a caliph. He was the custodian of the two holy mosques. But as I've learned recently, in a really fantastic history book written by Christopher de Belle Aigue, he was a lot more like his European contemporaries than I think traditional Christian historiography has made him out to be. Christopher is a writer, broadcaster, investigative journalist.

He's worked in Turkey, Middle East, South Asia for years, various brilliant publications. And he's now written the first volume of his history of Suleiman. You'll hear me talking about how much I love the book because I really did. And it's a very interesting history book. It's written in the present tense. It does feel like immersive drama, and yet it also feels like it's a very interesting history book. It's written in the present tense. It does feel like immersive drama, and yet it also feels like it's incredibly scholarly.

You're going to love this new approach to writing history. It is also one of the most dramatic times in European history when a power from the East threatens to conquer much of Eastern Central Europe, not least because you have this extraordinary admiral, Barbarossa, who's one of the great naval commanders of all time. And thanks to Barbarossa and other subordinates, Suleiman managed to conquer territory in Europe, Africa and Asia, taking the empire to its greatest extent, dominating a swathe of land,

really from the gates of Vienna right down to the Persian Gulf. I recorded this on location at the Chalk Valley History Festival, so it's noisy and wild, but it's worth it, folks. Stick with it, because Christopher is a brilliant scholar and a brilliant talker. And we should all know more about Suleiman and his empire in the 16th century. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. I was brought up to see the Ottomans as the other. I was so struck by their Europeanness, the fact that they are as European as the Venetians, the Habsburgs that they face across the battlefield. The role of Christianity within the empire, lapsed Christians, people that converted to Islam.

I mean, you just paint this picture of one of the great European Renaissance civilizations. Well, it is a remarkable thing. It's a truism that two historians can sit down and write about precisely the same events and precisely the same period of time, and yet write two entirely different books. The book that I chose to write was one that concentrated on the Ottomans' European calling at this time.

And it is a time when the Ottoman Sultan can depart Istanbul after the new year, so in late March or early April, catching the last of the squalls, and then march northwards, and march approaching a thousand miles and still be within Ottoman territory. And eventually he will get, as he does on two occasions, to the walls of Vienna. And that is where you're suddenly confronted with the other Europe which is the Christian Europe the Europe of the Habsburg Europe and of the German princely states and that whole expanse of territory going through the Balkans going through Hungary huge areas to the left and right of that triangle are Ottoman territory but then within the Ottoman superstructure you have a great cacophony of different voices, many of them Christian. And one of the sort of major characters, well, Ibrahim, who was mentioned in that extract, was born in Albania.

He was born Greek Orthodox, speaking Greek, but then he converted and became Grand Vizier. One of the more extraordinary characters is Alvisa Gritti, who is the illegitimate son of the Venetian doge. And he is denied the chance to rise and become great in Venice because of his illegitimate birth. And so he says, well, what am I going to do? I'll go to Istanbul and I'll make my fortune then. And how? I mean, he becomes the biggest oligarch of the day. He becomes Ottoman viceroy in Hungary. He's a cross between Roman Abramovich and Lord Curzon. I mean, he's really amazing as a character to write about.

And we've got Admiral Barbarossa, one of the great admirals, who, again, we don't think of in the European tradition. And yet he was Greek and is one of the great admirals in Mediterranean history. But tell us also about Solomon and his rise to power, because that's the thing that great admirals in Mediterranean history. But tell us also about Suleiman and his rise to power, because that's the thing that's endlessly fascinating in that culture. Well, it is very interesting. And the Ottoman way of dealing with the absence of primogeniture, which creates its own imbalances and its own complications,

because according to the Ottoman theory of statecraft, the sons of the reigning sultan have an equal claim to the throne once the sultan goes. And what that leads to is fratricidal warfare between the sons. And the sons are being prepared for the throne by their respective mothers, very often far from the capital, having been given provincial governorships. And there they are, they're getting ready, they're looking at Istanbul to see, when is this guy going to die and how do I react? At the same time as the sultan's reign goes on, he starts to feel a little bit insecure

because one of these sons may steal a march on his brothers and depose or kill the present sultan in order to get to Istanbul first. And getting to the capital is, of course, vital if you want to become the next sultan. Suleyman was helped in this respect because his father, Selim I, or Selim the Grim, as he came to be known in the West, was a man of quite unfathomable bloodthirstiness who killed every male member of his family, including, we think, his own father, in order to smooth his own rise to the throne. And it was only with a stroke of good fortune that Suleyman, young Suleyman, then growing up and being the governor of a town in

what is now western Turkey, escaped a similar fate. But when Selim dies, we think of the bubonic plague, the messenger comes and Suleiman is summoned to the capital. Again, he thinks that his father might have something horrible in store for him and he may not actually be dead. He is in fact dead. He gets to the capital and there he confronts the fact that he's the sultan of an empire he hardly knows. He's got personnel and pashas and viziers that he doesn't know and who think that they can control him. And then the entirety of Christendom is looking and thinking, who is this guy and what's he going to bring?

And how old is he approximately at this point? He's 26. Should we think about this being the apogee of Ottoman power? Yeah. This is why subsequent centuries called him the magnificent. And this first part of his reign, which is the part that I deal with in the Lion House, is really the time when he's showing off his magnificence to greatest effect. He's of course, has a lot of good fortune. He's inherited an empire that is functioning extremely well on all levels. The tax revenue is massive.

The territorial expansion has been enormous. The legitimacy is unquestioned because now, thanks to Selim, his father, the empire extends all the way down from Arabia, all the way up into the Balkans, and then considerably to the west and to the east. And of course, Christendom is very divided. Not only are the Habsburgs and the French monarchy at war, but also the French cannot really turn their attention southwards fully because of their fear that Henry VIII might launch attacks from across the English Channel or seek to increase his French possessions. And at the same time, we have this huge eruption, which is the Christian Reformation, which is just starting to ripple through and to cause incredible internal eruptions.

So Suleiman comes to power with an enormous amount of following wind. And it's so interesting that we think of the Renaissance princes, we think of Charles, of Austria and Spain, and we think of Francis, magnificent King of France, Henry VIII. But Suleiman is their contemporary and in many ways outshines them all. And yet I have not been brought up to put him with that group. It's a prerogative of all historians to say,

oh, the schools should be teaching my subject. And of course I would bang that drum and it's absolutely true, but we only have a certain amount of bandwidth and children have to learn other things. However, it must be said that an element of world history is absolutely vital to a proper historical understanding. And I would say if you're going to learn Tudor history at school, then you should also learn Ottoman history at school to see what is happening at the other end of Europe and to put Henry's England into a kind of wider context. And from that, you get onto this extraordinary, really existential battle for the monarchy of the world, which is waged between

Suleyman and Charles V, the Habsburg emperor. And there is a very personal thing going on there. They both have been told by their advisors, also by God, that they are the heirs of the world monarchy. They are the heirs of the Roman Empire. And so there's not room for both of them. So Solomon, he marches up to the Balkans on two occasions to the walls of Vienna. He comes pretty close to taking the fight right to his enemy's capital. the walls of Vienna, he comes pretty close to taking the fight right to his enemy's capital. Suleiman does it once and then a subsequent sultan does it later on. But Suleiman does it and he gets twice really quite close to Vienna. And on one occasion, he gets actually up to the walls. And one of the problems, if you have such a vast empire, is that by the time you reach the

walls of Vienna, and we know that the walls of Vienna are not simply a symbolic thing. When you take Vienna, then the road to a lot of Western Europe is open, the road to the Rhine is open, and ultimately the road to Paris. So it's an extremely important bridgehead that needs to be taken. But each time he comes close, it's September. The weather is turning. Your enemy is within the walls and your janissaries, your crack troops, are starting to get restless. They're not only getting restless, but they're also getting cold and the supply lines are stretched. And the other thing, if you're the world emperor like Soleimani, is that half your empire is actually the other side of Istanbul. Suleyman is that half your empire is actually the other side of Istanbul. And those pesky Iranians could always take advantage of your being occupied at the walls of Vienna to come in and cause trouble in Anatolia. And that's something that Suleyman cannot entertain. He needs to be back in his capital to prevent anything like that from happening. The other thing about the Ottoman sultan is he cannot depute these campaigns to an underling.

It's absolutely vital that he be there because he is the talisman of the army. And without him, the army just simply cannot function. He has to be there leading his army. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Suleiman the Magnificent. More after this. breaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So I would like to know more about how the Ottoman Empire works. What role does Islam and religion play under Suleiman? Islam is hugely important to the legitimacy of the state, and Suleiman is the vice regent of God so his entire impulse is guided along with the other things like lucre and money and territory it is all guided by this idea that there's something called the golden apple which is this mythical state of sublime wealth and of pleasing God and this golden apple lies deep in Christian territory, in Christendom, and that he's been placed on this earth in order to grab hold of that golden apple. And this is

what drives the Janissaries forward, and there are prophecies to that effect. But at the same time, a very large proportion of his subjects are not Muslim at all. They are Christians and they remain Christian. And the sultan feels very strongly that he is also the protector and the guarantor of the safety of these Christians and to a lesser extent of Jews. There were a lot of Jews in Istanbul, there were a lot of Jews elsewhere in the empire. So Suleyman has this dual role. He has to uphold Islam and also he has to protect the Christians and other minorities. And he would have regarded that as very much consistent with each other. There is no discrepancy between the two. But this paints a very different picture than the one you get from Habsburg, Spain, for example, where the rising tide of

intolerance has led to the beginnings of the Inquisition, the expulsion and forced conversion of vast numbers of Muslims, the expulsion of Jews, many of whom took refuge in the Ottoman Empire. And so you have very much a stark contrast at this stage in the Ottoman adventure, which is of an Islam that is also protective of its minorities. And you see that going through the Balkans. You see Balkan towns that are overwhelmingly Christian that are at the same time loyal.

And what the Sultan brings is he brings stability, he brings the rule of law, he brings good roads, he brings, in short, good government. And he can offer glittering careers to people from all different creeds. So the question of the Janissaries is very interesting and instructive. The Janissaries are beholden to the Sultan, they owe their loyalty to the Sultan, and they are a levy that the Ottoman army levies when it goes into a new territory. This is coercion, this is coercive, this is not voluntary.

But what happens to these boys that are levied from Balkan populations that have just been captured is that they get taken off to Istanbul, they get converted, they don't have any say in the matter, they get converted, and then they get offered a path to preferment that is absolutely remarkable. And some of them end up Grand Vizier, and some of them end up grand vizier and some of them end up leading the army and then interestingly a lot of them bring their relations to Istanbul and they say all you do is accept the snip and convert and then all of this can also be yours and so a lot of them follow that path and this is one of the kind of major bones of historical contention now in places like Hungary is the extent to which people did convert and did voluntarily convert.

Because, of course, it has a bearing on today's kind of nationalist temper and also the general feeling which is anti-Muslim in a lot of Eastern Europe today. Just enlarge on Get the Snip. It's not difficult to become Muslim but circumcision is definitely part of the ritual. It's something that happens to every Muslim boy and in the Lion House you will find a loving description of the circumcision ceremonies of three of the Sultan's sons which are an enormous opportunity for the Sultan to display his wealth. And we're lucky enough to have four or five extraordinary eyewitness accounts of that 14-day ceremony, which completely takes over Istanbul.

All the Ottomans, foreign interlocutors, are invited. They're told, you have to be there in the tribunes, sending back your reports just to show how magnificent we are. So, Suleiman establishes his royal hold on government. He advances into the Balkans. It's difficult against the Habsburgs. But his, as you mentioned, probably least successful episode actually is heading east. He comes close to being unstuck as he marches against the Iranians.

Yes, there's a remarkable, as a historian, it's an absolute joy to write about. Ibrahim Pasha, who is the convert who becomes Grand Vizier, the Sultan's bosom buddy, also is in charge of the army, is sent east to deal the Iranians a blow. Because, of course, at the same time that Europe is undergoing the Reformation, Islam is sundering in a definitive way between Sunnism and Shiism. And Sunnism is now increasingly associated with the Ottoman Empire, with Suleyman and his apparatus, and Shiism is increasingly associated with Iran and the Shah there. And also the Shah keeps coming in through the back door into the Ottoman Empire

and trying to take territory and generally being a nuisance. So Ibrahim is sent out there. There's quite a lot of internal politics going on within the army. There's a very bad feeling within the army because the sultan isn't there. Ultimately, the sultan does come out about a year later, and there's a march into northern Iran where the shah, he disposes of a tiny force compared to this sort of massive Ottoman army. But he draws them in, in classic Persian fashion, deep into the heart of the

Persian plateau, and then he disappears. And he lets winter do the rest. And there's a terrible snowstorm at Sultania, which is in northern Iran, where thousands of Turkish Ottoman troops are simply frozen to death. An Iranian poet passes by afterwards, and he comes across these thousands of dead bodies, and the poet says, and I asked, who was responsible for the death of all these Ottoman soldiers? And the breeze replied, it was I. After that, the remnants of the army have to get to Baghdad, which is the ultimate objective. And they have to cross the Zagros Mountains in order to get there. And they're being harried and they're being pursued

by Iranian horsemen on their fleet ponies that just come in and then they launch attacks and then they move away. All the while, the snow is falling, the passes are impassable, all the ordinance has to be left behind. It's a complete disaster. And this is the moment where Ibrahim Pasha, who has just risen so high and so meteorically feels that he may be in trouble.

And so he has to deflect the blame for this disastrous campaign onto the quartermaster, which he does. And the quartermaster is executed in the month of Ramadan in the main market square in Baghdad. And that night, we know this because the chronicler tells us, that night Suleyman is asleep and the quartermaster approaches the sultan in his bed and he unwinds his turban and he winds it around the sultan's long swan-likelike neck, and he pulls it tighter and tighter.

And when Suleyman awakes, he knows that an injustice has been done, and he says to himself, my vizier, my beloved Ibrahim Pasha, will not survive another 12 months. He overreached. Another theatre of operations, the Mediterranean, I mentioned earlier. I was astonished by the extent that the Mediterranean is an Ottoman lake at this point. Absolutely. I mean, Barbarossa, the great pirate, he was of Turkish origin, although his grandfather was a Greek Orthodox priest from the Isle of Lesbos. He becomes a free agent, takes over Tunis and Algiers,

and then Suleyman looks at himself and says, well, we need all of that to be ours. And he's of Turkish origin. So let's bring him in. So he's brought in, he's given the grand admiralship of the Ottoman Empire. And he, after the Sultan himself, becomes the second best known Ottoman of the time. He sows terror into the hearts of every Christian who is afloat on the high seas and we have an extraordinary account by one of his shipmates written in very kind of rough and ready demotic Turkish that has survived to this day so we know a great deal about these extraordinary campaigns that they went on and they went into Iberia and they launched raids in order to get Muslims who were being oppressed there by Habsburg Spain and were being forced to convert. And they bring something like 40,000 Muslims

across the water into North Africa and they resettle them there and they repopulate them there. Pope Clement, he can't even go to his daughter's wedding because he's so terrified of leaving Italy because of Suleiman's men. Barbarossa, he wants a present for the sultan and he comes ashore. He's heard that there's a famous beauty called Giulia Gonzaga who lives in a castle just inland from Sparolonghi in Fondi. And he comes ashore at night and he has excellent intelligence and he spends the night riding up to the castle at Fondi and he gains entrance to Julia's castle. And Julia is awoken by an attendant

and she slips out in her knight attire and she leaps on a horse and she gets away. And so Barbarossa is thwarted in this and so he gives vent to his fury on a couple of monasteries and then he gets out and by the time the Italians get themselves together, he's halfway across the ocean. He's unbelievably agile. It's such an extraordinary use of naval power. Where did it all go wrong for the Ottomans? Where you leave it, you think these people are undefeatable. Well, luckily enough for Suleyman, by the end of his reign, and he reigned for well,

50 years, the Ottoman Empire is really at a kind of plateau in terms of reach, influence, wealth, and good governance. The machine is just purring. It's absolutely extraordinary. The coffers just keep being replenished. By the end of his reign, there's probably a sense that he's reached the natural limits of expansion. The sequel to The Lion House will be the middle third of his reign, where he starts to standardize Ottoman life and become, in kind of architectural and tactile form, a proper imperialist. That means he has the greatest mosque builder of all time, Mimar Sinan, is brought in, and he's the Christopher Wren of the Ottoman Empire. He builds extraordinary mosques the length and breadth of the country. Suleyman, he codifies the law system

and all of that sort of thing. Where does it go wrong? How long can an empire last? I mean, all empires have to ebb and flow. Essentially, the process of territory being chipped away starts in the 17th century, but the decline is very long and drawling. And it's not really until the late 18th and 19th century that the internal kind of dysfunctions of the Ottoman Empire become apparent. And the rise of nationalism among those subject peoples that we were talking about starts to make itself apparent. And it is those nationalisms ultimately that are the death of the Ottoman Empire. That was a brilliant rampage for the first third of Solomon's career.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, John. you