Empire: World History - 26. Suspicion and Sorrow in Suleiman's Court

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Murdered love interests, intellectual curiosity, incredible barbarity, and body doubles all make an appearance in this week’s episode. Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Marc Baer to discuss the remainder of Suleiman the Magnificent’s rule.  To get your free two week trial for Find my past, go to www.findmypast.co.uk and sign up.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/xempire   Twitter: @Empirepoduk   Goalhangerpodcasts.com   Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupul. Now, once again, we're joined by the fantastic Mark Bear, who last week took us from the fall of Constantinople, through the court of the rather brilliantly named Salim the Grimm, up to 1533 in Suleiman the Magnificence's marriage to Roxalana.

And this marriage is bound to cause trouble in the court, as Roxalana is now the new favorite, and that's clearly going to cheese off one Ibrahim. But also, isn't it true, Mark, Roxalana is going to be a little bit scared of upsetting Ibrahim. Just talk a little bit about the power struggle we're creating here. It feels unhealthy because also Suleiman. had other children. And the Janissaries had their favorites. And so Suleiman has had children with, he's had sons with another woman by the name of Mahidevran. And so there are people in the palace who side with her. And there are women poets who are against Hurem Sultan, Roxalana. And then

there's also the Janissaries are going to pick their favors. And the Janissaries are going to have a view on which of the sons is supposed to be the next one. And then there's the viziers who are also, maybe they're on the side of Mahidevran, maybe they're on the side of Hurem. So this is going to cause a lot of bloodshed in the coming years. But first, Suleiman has to get rid of Ibrahim.

So again, Ibrahim was a slave, and the Ottoman Empire was a place where the lowliest slave could rise to the heights and be super powerful. He had a palace on the hippodrome. He slept in the same bedchamber with the emperor,

with the Caesar, with the caliph. He was commander of armies. He was the head of the government. But Suleiman, one night, I think it was during the Iids of March, after having dinner with him. It's a bad time if you had no one should go anywhere on the aides of March.

I mean, I don't know why people do it. In 1536, had him strangled. What? Wait. This is his former lover. So is it really as macchiavellian as this? He says, come to dinner, my friend. Yeah, they had.

The man I love, we're going to have a few laughs. Think about conquests. Absolutely. They, you know, these two men rose together. Ibrahim from obscurity, Suleiman from a position where others didn't believe in him or trust him. The two men rose together with all their conquests. And Ibrahim was the one, remember, he's the one who had that crown made for Suleiman.

He's the one who had all these. writers write about Suleiman as divine to prove his power and the proof that really there's only one son, he did away with him. So he kills his boyhood friend, lover, minister. But he doesn't do it himself. He gets his assassins to do. And I'm intrigued by the assassins because he's assassins. I mean, is this right? They're all deaf mute so they can say nothing and they wind. It's the equivalent of a mafia hit. It's not garrotting with piano wire, but it's something like that, isn't it? That's what happens. Yeah, they strangle him. Which is, Not the worst way to die.

There's all the bad ways to die, but he is straight. He's not stone to death or something. This is not unusual, though. The Abbasids, for example, they have this whole succession of viziers from the Barma Kid dynasty. And then there's this great godfather-like scene when, again, they have dinner and all the Barma kids. In about five different palaces across Baghdad are strangled on the same night and done away with. It's a kind of massive godfather-like wipeout of the entire Barma. McKinternity. So there are precedents for this. But now there's no Ibrahim. So now that's Hurem.

So now Ibrahim can't have his ear. He's buried in an obscure grave. But now Hurem has his ear. But again, there are other people around there. So they had, Hurem and Suleiman had a son named Mehmet that they loved to death. But Mehmet also got plague and died. And so this is 1543, a few years after this. And so, so Suleiman's a man who, you know, he knows, in his later years, he's going to be quite melancholy. And in his later years, he's going to move away from all these ecstatic claims about his messianic divine powers. And he's going to, you know, he was actually, he was trained as a goldsmith. But he's going to abandon all of that, all of the luxuries, all the fineries, all of the enjoyment of life. He's going to turn to melancholy, a melancholy path,

similar to Charles V, at the end of his life, would withdraw to a monosthen. Who is the Habsburg Emperor, who is his direct rival and direct contemporary? But then the thing about Suleiman is that here's a man who he's done away with his childhood friend and supporter Ibrahim, then he's lost Mehmed of plague. He doesn't separate from the tomb. He just can't believe it. But then 10 years later, he is going to have executed Mustafa, another son. Now, Mustafa was a son from Mahidevran, his other, another concubine.

And this was, this Mustafa was the one who was supposed to be his successor. He was the golden boy, wasn't he? Everyone loved him. Everyone, he had a lot of support in the court. The Janissaries wanted him. They wanted him, yeah. And Suleiman had him strangled. Now, did he have him sangled because Roxalana was filling his ear?

Yes, his Roxelan behind all this. It's Roxalana did all this, didn't it? Because if Mustafa becomes the next Sultan, then her boys have had it. So is she just drip, drip, drip, dripping in his ear, lies and untruths about must of her? Well, if you read the poetry written at court by the ones who are against her, some of the women poets, then yeah, she's this, they use really nasty language about her. But there's also this misogynistic streak in the history out of that era, which is then picked up by the moderns. And so historians to this day still will blame the woman, blame Hureem for everything.

But I think, again, let's look at the bigger picture because Suleiman will also have another of his kids, his sons killed, Bayezid. Now, Bayezid will actually come out in rebellion against Suleiman and then run off to the enemy Safavids. And Suleiman will tell them, do away with them, and they will. But then Suleiman then will have the sons, so his grandsons, the sons of Bayezed and the sons of Mustafa also killed. And by the way, he'll do away with three brothers-in-law, not just the one who called, you know, these men who marry, have the misfortune to marry his sisters. He'll have three of them executed.

So you have to think of the big picture here. And we can't just say, oh, it's Hurrah, Hureem Sultan is whispering in his ear. Here's a man who is a megalomaniac who can brook no criticism, who can stand not to have anybody else around him who's going to possibly be as powerful as he is. So, I mean, all of this I'm thinking, you know, you carry on killing the people who you once loved or who once loved you. At the end of your life will probably be a very lonely, paranoid and difficult place, no? After Hurem passes away, then he, that's when he turns to, you know, a life of simplicity.

Maybe he even wears just a green cloak like the prophet was supposed to have worn or a simple cloak, gets rid of all the finery and all the jewelry. Yeah, so he's a man who, as a young man, is this arrogant, megalomaniac, successful, incredible ruler, trying to take over the world. People around him tell him he's godlike. But then by the end of his reign, and you can see in some of the Ottoman miniatures, it's not just age that has tired him and wearied him. It's also some of the decisions he's made. and the fact that after Harem, there's no one else around him who he loves. Mark, what I loved about your book was that we get, in a sense, the Game of Thronesy drama, we get all this loving, we get all this conquest.

It's all very exciting. But what I suppose would probably surprise most of your readers was you also paint a picture of the Ottomans who are doing the strangling these viziers and all this stuff, but very much also as part of the European age of discovery, which is something which we very much don't think of in the stereotype. We think of the Ottomans as the enemy, the other side, the opposition, the dark other to Europe's kind of glorious renaissance. Because at the same time as this is going on,

Michelangelo is still alive, painting the last judgment on the Sistine Chapel. This is directly the same time as Suleiman the Magnificent. and yet your book shows that the Ottomans far from being this sort of exotic, murderous, violent place alone were also major intellectual, you mentioned just now how they built the colleges next to their mosques, that this is a powerhouse of intellectualism, a powerhouse of innovative commerce, and also a place where there's huge intellectual curiosity, which is something that not only do we not usually think of the Ottomans, we think of the opposite. We think of them as being incurious. Well, where refugees find home, you know, where everyone else is chased out

of other parts of Europe, who, you know, the Jews in particular, the Jews in particular, can thrive and can have a life. Yeah, no, I was absolutely gripped by that in the comparison mark. So the Ottomans, again, that the Ottoman strength is in their recognizing that they can use the human resources around them for their own greatness and for their own strength. And they, so they, if they believe, as they did in the early centuries, that Jews were the best physicians, then they'll bring Jews in and they'll employ Jews as the privy physician. So in, in this country, Jews have been put into castles and then... This country being, you're talking from London. Here in England, here in England, so in your castle, the Jews are put in your castle, and then the castle is burnt,

to the ground. And Jews are thrown down wells. And in this country of England, they come up with the idea of the blood libel that Jews, you know, they extract blood from boys to make their special bread, the matzah during the Passover. So that's what's going on in Western Europe, where Jews are murdered, forcibly converted, expelled. The Ottomans are a kingdom where the Jews are welcome. And so, again, murdered, converted, expelled from every other kingdom in Europe, the Jews in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 100,000 will coalesce in the Ottoman Empire where many of them who are forcibly converted to Catholicism will return to Judaism. And Salonica is the greatest Jewish city in the world at this point, no? Right. So Salonika, which is today, Thessaloniki in Greece, probably has a plurality of Jewish people in it. So the largest group of people in the city are Jewish.

Greeks are a small minority after the Ottoman conquest. And also the Ottomans, we talked about Rhodes. So when Suleiman takes Rhodes, he expels Christians from the walled city. Christians are not allowed to reside within the walled city of Rhodes, but Jews are. So you can go today to the Shalom Synagogue in Rhodes. Even after the horror of the Nazis, there's Jews on Rhodes who celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday in that synagogue. that was built during the reign of Suleiman. And we should just add here, jumping forward,

that the Jewish community in Saloniki survives until the Western Europeans come back in the form of the Nazis in 1940. Yes. So the Ottomans are open to receiving every type of... Again, the Ottomans in the early centuries are, again, to be Ottoman, they create this new class of people that's built from converted Christians.

So the Ottomans themselves are always making themselves out of other component parts. So they're bringing to their empire the best of east and west, whether it's the best spies, merchants, physicians, astronomers from the east. So the Jews are brought in. Tell me about the intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire at this point. Bernard Lewis famously portrays it as a civilization which never moves forward. It doesn't have the printing press. It remains convinced of its own brilliance. And so while Europe is expanding and becoming more intellectually brave and voracious, the Ottomans don't move forward in Bernard Lewis's view. But that's not the view you present in your book at all.

Well, these are all stereotypes, stereotypes of Muslims not engaging in commerce and trade. We know there are Ottoman traders in Venice. And in Venice, in the Venetian Republic, they had a Turkish In is what they called it. Fondacki de Turkey. Yeah, and there's a little mosque there, and we know that there were Ottoman Muslim traders in what is today India and also in Southeast Asia. So again, these stereotypes about Muslims only allowing the commerce trade to be in the hands of Christians and Jews is simply not true.

It's also the case that all these claims are made about the Ottomans that they were against the printing press. Well, then what is the Jewish printing press? Is that not an Ottoman printing press? So the Jews are... Sitting in a... Istanbul. Right. So the Jews, or Salonica, becomes the greatest Jewish press. So Jews are kicked out of the rest of Europe, but they're allowed to print their holy books and their, their commentaries and

their histories in many languages in the Ottoman Empire. And so are the Christians. So we have to include everybody in the empire as the Ottomans did. As far as intellectual curiosity, in the late 16th century, the Ottomans built in Istanbul, but what, Constantinople, or Istanbul, one of the most sophisticated, advanced, important observatories that existed on the planet. And this was using the wisdom of the east of other Muslim astronomers. And they built that, and this was the envy of the world.

It's also the case, though, that several years later, this is at the end of the 16th century, that observatory was destroyed in a, in a rebellion, in an uprising. So then people like Lewis and not only Lewis, but the Turkish dean of Ottoman studies, Halil Inoljic, have used this as an indictment on all six Ottoman centuries, saying, oh, see, that's what happened. They had a chance to be the greatest scientists on the planet,

but then these fanatics, these reactionaries, they destroy their own observatory. We can't make a civilizational indictment based on one event that's happening in one part of the empire. So the Ottomans did have very important advancements in medicine, also even in history writing. So we think of, when we think of the Renaissance, it's not just the poetry and so on, but it's also the concept of writing the history of a kingdom and a ruler having historians around him, telling the story in a propagandistic way. So the Ottomans did that as well. They're part of Renaissance Europe. Mark, one of the most thrilling moments in your book. is when you describe your own work.

You're sitting in the top KAPI archives and you're working away. And in the next door room, someone gets out the Piri-Rae's map. Talk about that. It's a wonderful. Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Well, within Top Kappa Palace, there is a small mosque from the 15th century, a beautiful red brick mosque.

One room is, well, it's the prayer room. Now, today, that is the main Ottoman palace, not archive, but it's the palace library. So if you want to go look at, say, Mehmed II's collection of books in Armenian, Greek, Italian, Arabic, you name it, it's there. So you go there as a researcher. And so the main prayer room, which has some beautiful tiles on the wall. Gorgeous is Nick tiles, yeah. Absolutely.

So this room is the reading room. And then next to it, the next room is where they keep the treasures, all these unbelievably important manuscripts. scripts. So one day, and it's normally quite a dark place when I was there in the 90s, it wasn't too well lit. But I went in there one day and it's bathed in light, absolutely bathed in light. It's as if, you know, it's middle of summer. And there's a television crew there actually from Japan. And they have the cameras focused on a table where this magnificent gazelle skin parchment map is set up. Now, this map is the map of Piri Raiz. Peri Raiz was someone who became the Admiral of the Ottoman Navy, and he had drawn up a map of the world based on all of the ancient

wisdom as well as the latest discoveries. He even had crew members from Columbus's voyages interviewed. And so then with this kind of knowledge then, they drew a map east and west. And the map was divided the Western Hemisphere, the Eastern Hemisphere. Now, the Ottomans wanted to know about the Western Hemisphere. And so they had, so this is, again, this is just an example of the Ottomans keeping up and being informed and being on top of things and then collecting the world's knowledge for their own purposes. Because then they actually use the eastern half of their map as they launch their naval campaigns into the Indian Ocean. Absolutely fabulous. Great. Let's take a short break. Welcome back to Empire. We've talked about how in Britain we're pretty ignorant about the Ottomans. You know, the portraits removed from Hampton Court and literally we have no idea what's in the storage rooms. In Turkey itself, Mark, what's the feeling towards the Ottomans today? Well, it's changed a lot in the last 20 years with a new Islamist regime. So prior to this, Turkey, of course, is a secular republic. And so the new country of Turkey, which established in

1923, turned its back on the Ottoman past. That was the rhetoric, that a new Turkey is born. We have nothing to do with these people in the past. Those who recently lost the First World War, committed genocide against the Armenians, and had impoverished and destroyed the land. They also saw the last sultan as a traitor because he signed agreements that would give away most of the territory remaining in the empire to the British and French and so on. So in the early 1920s, the rump part of the empire that remained in Istanbul and Anatolia, what is today Turkey, they literally, they try to decouculture, de-automans, everything.

They changed the language from Ottoman to modern Turkish. They changed the script from a modified Persian script, written in Arabic characters, right-left, to a Latin script. There's a long list of changes that they made. They tried to overnight make the Ottoman past illegible to the future generation. So that was how the Turkish Republic and people in it approached the Ottomans for a decade. Ataturk. Ataturk, the founder of Turkey.

Now, this began to change around 1953 and the anniversary, the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople. Then we began to see. Now, that conquest was seen as a Turkish conquest, not as an Ottoman conquest made by converted Christian administrators and so on, not as a conquest that then ushered in a multicultural city and so on. But a Turkish military exploit. So already in the 50s, we see that. Then in the 1980, after 1980 coup, with the new regime, the military regime began to institute a new curriculum called the Turkish Islamic synthesis, where Turkish people were taught actually, well, Islam and the Ottomans are kind of part of our past, something we need to be proud of. Forward now to the early 2000s. And when you have an Islamist party take power and consolidate rule, now we have a real nostalgia for the Ottomans as a Turkish military power and the envy of the world. And that's why we see that the

regime has reconverted Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul. Ataturk, the early Republic, had made it into a museum, a second republic. Erdogan converted it back to a mosque as it was in Ottoman times. And at the ceremony, they unsheathed Mehmet the Conquer's sword. But also, at the same time, we've seen these amazing soap operas conquer the world. Etterlölen. Oh yes. Erte Hulen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just for those who say, look, Mark, I mean, you are a poet and you speak so passionately about the Ottoman Empire. But are we not perhaps glossing over some of the really, really ugly stuff? Like, you know, I mean, we've talked about harems full of women. We've talked about the Janus series without actually examining. I'm like, I've got two little boys. The idea of someone just taking one of them and just deciding that, you know, I'm not going

to have him anymore and turning him into whatever they want him to be as a janissary of the Ottoman empire or women just suddenly being, you know, sort of sold as a slave market. Yes, I mean, this is a big slave society, isn't it? What about a quarter of Istanbul is slaves? Yeah. Yeah, it is built on slavery, isn't it? I mean, let's talk about that for a moment, shall we? Because those things are ugly. All of this is in the book. All of this is in the book. And in my teaching and all my writing the past 30 years, I don't seek to praise the Ottomans. I don't seek to excuse them. I also don't, I don't try to vilify them. I read Ottoman. I read Arabic. I read Persian. I read Hebrew. I look at Greek material. I look at the time period I'm writing about. And I try to understand

their world. And now, if Mammar II is writing love poems to young Christian boys, then I will write about that and talk about that. Because that was his world. It's as simple as that. So in my, of course, I include, I mean, slavery was a large part about, I talk about genocide not just in 1915, the genocide of the Armenian, the Ottoman Armenians, but also I talk about genocidal thoughts and practices. I mean, if we look at the system, the system of recruitment by which the Ottomans are taking as a tax one out of every 40 boys. The Dev Shirmei system. Yes, the collection.

They are collecting one out of every 40 boys. They're taking them away from their homes, away from their mothers. They're teaching them a new language, a series of languages, Islamic languages. They're converting them to Islam. These boys have no choice. They're 6, 7, 8, 10, 12. They're converting them. They're giving them new names.

They're turning them into servants of the ruler. So if you look at the post-war definition of jen, genocide? This is genocide when you take children from one group and forcefully take them and raise them as something else. So this is all in the book. I don't shy away from any of that. But we have to take it all together. So we have to talk about the beauty of their mosques, as well as talking about the fact that the people who built those mosques were slaves who were recruited from Christians. You talk with great nuance, Mark, and I think it's one of the great balancing acts that you perform in your book, about the degree to which the Ottoman's

were tolerant and the degree to which they weren't. You just talk about that a bit. Well, again, we have to think about what we might tolerate. So this isn't coexistence, this isn't anything I would want today. This isn't equality. So the Ottoman legal system was based on secular law as well as Islamic law, both, in which women had fewer rights than men. And Christians and Jews had less rights than Muslim.

and slaves were slaves. They didn't have the rights that free people had. And there were groups that were proscribed. So, Shi'is, for example, Shi'i Muslims were massacred in the empire, and these are the people who today in Turkey call themselves the Alevis or in Syria, the Alawites. They were subject to massacre in the Ottoman centuries. So tolerance means when the group or the person who has power tolerates a lot of bears the existence of the others.

So it's something that can be given, and this is why Jews rushed to the empire, because they were given tolerance. They were allowed to be Jews there, whereas they weren't allowed to be Jews in England at the time. But then tolerance can also be taken away. So at the end of empire, when we don't have a system of tolerance, we have a modern system has come into being, then tolerance is taken away, and then you have the possibility of mass murder. Right. And lest we forget, I mean, just let's again compare this to what else is going on in

Europe at the time. This is the 16th century where Jesuits are being burnt at the stake in England. I've got a very nice quote here, Mr. de la Mautre, who is escaping the persecution of the Huguenots in France, comes to Istanbul and writes, there is no country on earth where the exercise of all sorts of religions is more free and less subject to being troubled than in Turkey. Right. And again, if we look at the Ottomans in their context, then absolutely that they are more free. There were limits though. There were limits, of course. It had to do with loyalty. And if you're not loyal to the dynasty, then you have no place there. It was more about loyalty and obedience than about religion. So there were Muslims who were executed, not because they were heretics, but because they dared say that they're derving. leader was the one who should sit on the throne, that it wasn't Suleiman who writers described as the pole of the universe upon, you know, the whole universe is revolving around him. But then there were Sufis, these mystics, who said, actually, no, no, it can't be the Sultan. Ah, the leader of our

Sufi lodge, he's the pole. And they would go out and say this, and they would be executed. But that was, that was less heresy, because I had, I keep trying to emphasize how radical the religious vision of Suleiman was. And so there were in a way competing radical visions of divinity at play. But if someone wasn't loyal, then they had to be killed. But again, I think Anita's point is very important here. At the same time, in London, at the Taiburn, any Jesuit that's found is hung, drawn and quartered, his entrails are ripped out. And you go to some of the sort of Catholic places where these relics are kept today. And they are literally. relics in the same way that Mehmet was bringing back relics from Baghdad. And you see the blood

of such and such a Jesuit missionary on a chasible gathered by some believer at the Tyburn. And this is what's going on in London. So however much we may bulk at slavery, at the collection. Quite rightly. We're not much better here in London at this point. These things exist in a world that is brutal and where cruel things happen. Mark, one of the ideas that you promote in your book, which I thought was very, very interesting, is this idea that the Ottomans were part of the Age of Discovery. Talk to me about that. The Age of Discovery being the era when Western European powers went out into the world and would lead to the age of exploration, in other words, when they began to conquer territories

around the world, leading to the conquest of North America and Africa and so on. What we forget about is that the power against which they were competing, contending, was, of course, the Ottoman dynasty. So the Ottomans are there. All those books we've read about the Portuguese, the Portuguese main rival in the Red Sea, in the Indian Ocean, the rival over the spice trade is the Ottoman Empire. So this is the part of the story that I want to include. Yeah. And we also have them for coffee. Thanks for to the Ottomans.

I mean, just I'd like to do a personal, a personal thank you. I mean, just could you expand on that a little bit? Because without them, I would not be here today. And the sweetest smelling spot in Istanbul is the corner right outside the Spice Bazaar where they've been selling coffee for 500 years, so from the 16th century. Because coffee, of course, moves from Ethiopia to Yemen and then into the other Arabic-speaking countries, Egypt and so on. So when the Ottomans conquer that region in 1517 under Selim, they bring coffee with them. They bring coffee with them and then they bring coffee. And then

Venice we see coffee and then it spreads to the rest of Europe and to us. Look, you are such a brilliant guest. William and I have just loved talking to you because you bring this period to life in a really marvellous way. If only more academics could do the stuff of reading Ottoman and talk like you. It's wonderful. I mean, I feel bad. I feel But we have to just end this talking about death. And we've kind of left this subject. Hang it. We've gone on this marvelous detail.

I'm so glad that we have. But how we left Solomon. We last saw him having murdered a lot of people that loved him and he loved. Some he wanted to. Some he was perhaps misled and some, we don't know. Propaganda may have played its part. But he's become an aesthetic. He's wearing a green robe.

He is lonely. He is sad. And then what happens? What is the end of the magnificence? The end is also magnificent. Decade before his end, he does have his mosque completed. And it is sitting on a hill in Istanbul. The Soleimaniac complex.

It is an incredible complex. I've also conducted research there in the library, which used to be a college. And it's, again, it's absolutely a stunning work, not only for its magnificence, but also for its simplicity in a way. It's at the, towards the end of Israel. The greatest view over Istanbul. Absolutely. So he has this complex built in 1557.

It's really the stunning achievement in every way. But he brings components from throughout the empire, from Lebanon and from everywhere else. So it's a stunning thing. But what he has to do, though, is as part of the complex, he has to build a tomb for his beloved Hurem. And so it's this beautiful octagonal tomb, which is there by the mosque, as part of the complex. And he buries her there. And Hohr-R-M, again, to remind people, because he's a beautiful, It was a while ago.

We started to talk. Is this Roxalada's now official title? Roxalana, love of his life, replaceer of Ibrahim. Woman love of his life. A female love of his life. Correct. The man had a lot of love.

But this is a female love of his life. Yeah. So he's lost her. He's lost sons. He's lost his boyhood friend, Ibrahim. But he continues to battle. He continues to go on the battlefield. And he will pass away in 1566 on the battlefield,

on the front, besieging a, a citadel in what is today Hungary. And so the problem was, is that the battle was continuing. And the ministers didn't want this to be known, neither to the soldiers on the Ottoman side, nor to the enemy. So they had to keep it a secret. So they buried him under his tent. They actually temporarily buried him.

They surrounded, they put all kinds of sweet-smelling incense and all kinds of but they buried him in the ground beneath his tent and didn't let anybody know about it. Because they didn't want the king, they didn't want his empire to panic or they just wanted to find the right time. Why keep it a secret? Middle of the battle, but also because in Ottoman custom, you cannot bury a sultan until the previous one has been enthroned. The next one, right. Right. So his son, his successor is going to be Salaim, but Salaim is thousands of kilometers away in honor.

in Anatolia, and here they are in Hungary. So they've got to keep it a secret until Salim can make it to a place where the army can be informed and they can bear allegiance to him. So they've got to, first they've got to have Salim show up. And so Salim is going to progress from the east. He's going to go to Istanbul where he'll be enthroned before ministers and so on, and then he'll keep moving west towards Hungary to meet. But what's going to happen? Well, the Ottomans fortunately are able to quickly win the battle. So they're able to end the battle. But they still have to keep it secret. So what they do is the vizier pretends that Suleiman is still alive. So he shouts into the tent. You know, the potashah, Lempana,

you know, and he actually, I don't know if he voiced a response, but he pretends that Suleiman is still alive. And then the battle has been won. Now they've got to have their progression back to the imperial capital. They still can't, there's no sign of Salaim yet. So they have to pretend that Suleiman is moving with the army back to the imperial capital of Constantinople. So they put a lookalike. A body double. A body double in his carriage. They put a body double in his carriage and he looks out and waves and nods.

And meanwhile, the Grand Vizier, the minister in charge is writing imperial decrees in Solomon's name and so on. So they have to do it. And they make it all the way to Belgrade. Right. And then it's in Belgrade. where Salim then the successor is able to be take the liege of obedience from, of loyalty from the army, and then they say, oh, and the guy in the carriage, he's actually an actor.

And then they're able to then turn around, go back to, go to Constantinople. And then what's interesting, too, is how they then, they make it to the mosque complex in Istanbul, to the Sulomaniya. They bury Suleiman in the ground. They put a tent over him. and then they build the mausoleum around him. Wow. Next to Hurem. Next to Hurem.

Next to Hurem. Wow. Whereas Abraham, when we didn't say this, was just dumped in an unmarked grave, tied on the back of a horse, just galloped across the city and then just dumped in a hole. Love is hard. Love can be cruel. These are complicated times. It's a complicated time, and these are complicated people.

Look, there's nothing complicated about the thanks that we need to offer, Mark David Baer, who is just an extraordinary teller of tales, an extraordinary researcher, an extraordinary historian. The Ottomans, I mean, it's just beautiful inside and out. I really urge you to go and get it. It's a wonderful book, Carnes, Caesars and Caliphs at a good bookshop near you. Mark, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Mark. That's absolutely fabulous. Thank you for having me on the podcast. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And it's goodbye from me, William Turinpool.