Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  the realms of the Romans, and the Persians and the Arabs, hero of all that is, pride of the arena of earth and time!

  Of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea;

  Of the glorified Kaaba and the illumined Medina, the noble Jerusalem and the throne of Egypt, that rarity of the age;

  Of the province of Yemen, and Aden and Sana, and of Baghdad the abode of rectitude, and Basra and al-Hasa and the Cities of Nushirivan;

  Of the lands of Algiers and Azerbaijan, the steppes of the Kipchak and the land of Tartars;

  Of Kurdistan and Luristan, and of the countries of Rumelia and Anatolia and Karaman and Wallachia and Moldavia and Hungary all together, and of many more worthy kingdoms and countries:

  Sultan and Padishah.

  Suleyman was sometimes known as Suleyman II, in coy deference to his biblical namesake. He was to be styled ‘the Perfecter of the Perfect Number’, for his whole existence was hedged about with the number of good fortune, ten – the number of the Commandments, the number of Muhammad’s disciples, of the parts and variants of the Koran, of the toes, the fingers, and the astronomical heavens of Islam. Sultan Suleyman was the tenth ruler of his house, born at the beginning of the tenth century, the year 900 of the Hegira, AD 1493.

  Successive Venetian ambassadors at his court found themselves dealing with a sovereign who could put 100,000 men into the field at no visible cost, whose borders ran for 8,000 miles, who was so exalted that he only gave audience in profile, and then did not deign to speak. In their reports they were puzzled as how best to describe his powers, whether geographically, classically, politically, numerically or financially – so that one pictured his empire in near fantastical terms, saying its borders ran with Spain, Persia and the empire of Prester John.*

  Under no other sultan would the Ottoman Empire be so universally admired or feared. Suleyman’s corsairs plundered the ports of Spain. Indian rajahs begged his aid. So did the King of France, who once had letters smuggled to the Sultan from an Italian prison cell, hidden in the heel of his envoy’s shoe. The Iranians burnt their country on his account. The Hungarians lost their nobility at a stroke. ‘He roars like a lion along our frontier,’ wrote one foreign ambassador, and even the Habsburgs gave him tribute. His reputation was so splendid and magnanimous that twenty years after his death the English begged his successors for a fleet to help them tackle the Spanish Armada. Thirty years later a Neapolitan traveller went to admire his sepulchre in Constantinople, ‘for surely though he was a Turk, the least I could do was to look at his coffin with feeling, for the valorous deeds he accomplished when alive’. When he went to war – thirteen times on major campaigns, endlessly on stiletto raids – foreign descriptions of the cavalcade ran to chapters. The flight of the Knights of Rhodes to Malta in 1526 made the eastern Mediterranean Ottoman; and the coast of North Africa right up to Algiers was ruled by the Barbary corsairs in the Sultan’s name. When Suleyman went to sleep, four pages watched the candles for him. When he rode through the city or into battle or out hunting, they went with him, as one of the overwhelmed Venetian ambassadors reported, ‘one to carry his arms, another his rain clothes, the third a pitcher full of an iced drink, and the fourth something else’.

  Better known in Turkish history as Suleyman Kanuni, ‘the Lawgiver’, Suleyman oversaw the most detailed codification of sultanic and Koranic law that had ever been known in an Islamic state, surpassed only by the work of Justinian, in the same city of Constantinople, almost a thousand years before. The law fixed the duties and rights of all the Sultan’s subjects, in accordance with Islamic precepts, established the relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims, and laid out the codes by which society was to understand and comport itself, down to the clothes which different people were to wear.

  He ruled so long that he became something of an Ottoman Queen Victoria, the very embodiment of his state. Fantastically impassive, for example, was his reaction to news of a great naval victory over the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia and the Low Countries and Emperor Elect of all the Germanies, Charles V, whom Suleyman referred to as ‘the King of Spain’. When the Ottoman admiral sailed his fleet up the Horn, a little pinnace ran ahead trailing the high standard of Spain in the water from her stern. The admiral’s flagship was laden with high-born Christians, including a Spanish commander-in-chief. A long line of captured vessels, dismasted and rudderless, bobbed along behind like ducks, while forty-seven other ships of the Christian fleet – ships of Naples, Florence, Genoa, Sicily and Malta (all fitted up by the Pope himself) – were now sunk in the shallows off the Tunisian coast. The Spanish were chastened by their attempt on North Africa. Their greatest admiral, Andrea Doria, was lucky to escape to Italy with his life. Suleyman went down to a kiosk on the water’s edge to give his Kapudan Pasha the honour of his attendance; but not for a second did his expression change, ‘the same severity and gravity as if the victory had nothing concerned him, so capable was the heart of that old sire of any fortune, were it never so great’.

  He fell in love magnificently, and to the astonishment of the whole world he not only married the slave girl Roxelana, but was faithful to her; and everyone – the French, the Italians, the Russians – unabashedly claimed her as their own. He seldom wore the same clothes twice. He was majestic enough to stock his court with an unusual number of buffoons, dwarves, mutes, astrologers, and silent janissaries; lofty enough to enrol in a janissary regiment, and draw pay with them; and so rich that one bailio advised the Serenissima that it was no longer the value of presents that counted at court, but only their volume, for nobody even bothered to look at them.

  Suleyman’s first move in 1521 was to offer to suspend Turkish raids against Hungary in return for tribute. The Hungarians clipped the ears and nose of his envoy and sent him back. An envoy of their own was sent to Worms, where so many princes of the Holy Roman Empire had assembled in diet, to seek allies in the coming war. ‘Who prevented the unbridled madness of the Turks from raging further?’ the envoy demanded, with magificent flourish. ‘The Hungarians!’ The princes had not come to hear him, though; just the day before, Charles V had condemned Luther as a heretic, and the Holy Roman Empire was about to fall part.

  So while the cream of Hungarian society attended a wedding in Pressburg, the gentle lamb took Belgrade. The loss of Belgrade punctured the southern Hungarian defence line: Busbecq was thinking of this when he described the Turks as ‘mighty rivers, swollen with rain, which, if they can trickle through at any point in the banks, spread through the breach and cause infinite destruction’. This, and Suleyman’s attack on Rhodes, brilliantly marshalled and so relentlessly pursued that he had his war tent rebuilt in stone to represent his adamantine determination, signalled the return of the Ottomans to Europe.

  For two hundred years the Knights of the Order of St John on Rhodes had been preying on Muslim shipping, sheltering Christian pirates, and massacring their prisoners. (An Englishwoman en route for Jerusalem in 1320 had supposedly purged her soul by dispatching a thousand saracens herself.) Their presence as a hostile island in the Sultan’s seas imperilled the passage of Egyptian grain and Egyptian cash to Istanbul, and those shipbound pilgrims to Mecca whom the Sultan was newly bound to protect. Their fortress was considered impregnable. They had 60,000 men, one of whom had invented a giant cowhide stethoscope to hear where the enemy were digging mines; another was the son of Suleyman’s great-uncle Cem; he was a Christian who fought with the knights. When Suleyman took the surrender of the place he asked for them both. The knights pretended the stethoscope man was dead and smuggled him out; but Cem’s son was handed over to be killed along with his family. In an audience given on Christmas Day, Suleyman praised the Grand Master of the order for his gallant defence. It caused him great sorrow, he whispered aside, to make this Christian in his old age abandon his home and his belongings. The knights left on New Year’s Day 1523, and ten years later they established themselves again on Malta, further to the west, leaving the eastern Mediterranean to the Ot
tomans.

  Rhodes

  In Hungary, the collapse of the southern defences coincided with the shattering of the country’s political strength. A young Polish king had been elected. Louis was ten when they crowned him: born too soon, married too soon, king too soon, died too soon, they quipped afterwards. Four years later, in 1526, when the magnates were at last driven to make common cause with the crown, they moaned that the royal policy of going forward to meet the enemy was an expense better avoided, and insisted on camping at Mohacs, between a marsh and a river. All the errors the French had committed at Nicopolis the Hungarians now repeated. The nobility clamoured for battle. They refused to fall back and gather in a Transylvanian army, or to wait for the Bohemians; and they haughtily dismissed the suggestion of a Polish mercenary that they entrench behind fortified waggons, as the Bohemian Hussites had done to such effect against cavalry at the battle of the White Mountain. They died just as the French at Nicopolis had done, driving too far into the enemy centre and enclosed by the Turkish wings like a fly in a trap. Hungary died at Mohacs: two archbishops, five bishops, most of its magnates and knights. As for the little king himself, Suleyman wept to see his corpse; but his chronicler reflected the general satisfaction. ‘A nation of impious men has been extirpated! Praise be to God!’ he wrote. The keys to Buda were offered up by the common townsmen, who had lost their leaders, and the city was razed to the ground. The great library of Matthias Corvinus was shipped to Istanbul along with two enormous cannons, abandoned by Mehmet the Conqueror at the siege of Belgrade in 1456. The army marched home along the left bank of the Danube, having approached on the right, taking booty all the way to Peterwaradin; and in November the Sultan made a triumphal entry into Constantinople.

  It was twenty years before Suleyman formally annexed Hungary to his dominions, preferring to see the region buffeted by squabbles between rival claimants to the throne while he turned his attention to Persia and the Mediterranean. Little Louis II had died childless; John Zapolya, Voivode of Transylvania, claimed the throne with Ottoman support by the election of his peers. Ferdinand, Duke of Austria, and brother to Charles V, advanced his candidacy through marriage. ‘No king, only a little man of Vienna,’ the Ottomans called him, but he had the Habsburg doggedness and by 1538 he had persuaded Zapolya, who had neither wife nor child, to make him his heir.

  Zapolya promptly married a Polish princess, Isabella, who bore him a son two weeks before he died, annulling as far as he was concerned his earlier agreement with Ferdinand. It was such a fortuitous event that Suleyman even sent a chaush to witness for himself the queen suckling the infant. Ferdinand of Austria, without the money to press his claim very forcibly, was thwarted; but really it all made very little difference. In 1541 Suleyman arrived at Buda, which Isabella had been defending against Ferdinand’s attacks, and lifted it from her with an oath to return it when her baby came of age. Ferdinand was granted a peace a few years later, which allowed him to keep a little corner of north-eastern Hungary in return for 30,000 ducats in tribute; and the queen, when the moment came, was persuaded to accept estates in southern Poland.

  But although Suleyman consistently treated Ferdinand with withering contempt, that ‘little man of Vienna’ kept resolute possession of his capital. Vienna, by rights, should have long since fallen to the Sultan. As early as 1529, three years after Mohacs and the capture of Buda, a surprisingly rapid series of victories in Hungary had brought Suleyman’s army to Vienna’s walls. ‘Tell him that I will look for him on the field of Mohacs, or even in Pest,’ Suleyman had told the Archduke’s envoys; ‘and if he fails to meet me there I will offer him battle beneath the walls of Vienna itself.’ Now those walls were pierced; the suburbs were burnt; and the city itself, according to its defenders, was on the point of giving way, when Suleyman abruptly announced his decision to withdraw on 14 October 1529. He spent, that year, 201 days on the march, and a mere nineteen on the siege.

  In 1532 he came back, with an army primed for the assault – perhaps as many as 300,000 men, including those who swung into place as they marched through Hungary in July and August. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King of Spain and her colonies, was this time in Vienna, as Suleyman knew. For a moment Charles had quieted his bickering princes, allowing him to raise an army in Germany and visit the battlefront in person. Charles V and Sultan Suleyman were, each in his respective sphere, the lords of the age. Upon Charles’s victory hung the future of his own house, of course, with that of the lands he ruled, Spain, the Netherlands, much of Italy and the whole of Germany, from the Baltic to Bohemia. In all Christendom only the French, everywhere squeezed between Habsburg satraps, were eager to see him beaten.

  The weather, which was bad when the Ottoman army left Edirne in May, became atrocious by mid-June, when they reached the little town of Guns, some seventy miles south-east of Vienna on the River Raab (the modern Koeszegh). The incessant rain had forced the abandonment of the unwieldy big cannon, drawn by oxen who slipped and slithered in the mud and slowed down the pace of the whole army, while Guns itself was so small that the besieging force was never able to deploy its numerical advantage to best effect. The tiny garrison, of course, had no business holding out: their defence was foolhardy and gallant. Repeated assaults, similar to those which had battered the walls and exhausted the defences of Constantinople, did finally force the surrender of the citadel. The Ottomans allowed the garrison to march out with full military honours but the progress of the Ottoman army had been checked by a month. The campaign season was too far advanced for a full-scale siege of Vienna to have much chance of success; Suleyman must have hoped, instead, that the Habsburg army would come out to meet him. It refused him that satisfaction.

  Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent had much in common; and though each made much of the other’s failure to give battle, and declared himself victor by default, both were perhaps relieved that the gigantic edifices which they carried on their backs had not been hazarded in a day’s battle.* And for Suleyman it was not a defeat; not by any means. Yet a succession of victories like these gave him pause for thought. In 1537 he led the first campaign in the Ottoman annals to return without booty; and almost twenty years later, after his failure against the Knights of Malta in 1556, he brought the fleet home by night, and wandered the streets of Istanbul incognito to hear what the people said.

  Suleyman’s high aspirations warred with his suspicious, gloomy, passionate nature. His long reign is flawed by tragedy more subtle than the hubris which had overcome his ancestor Bayezit the Thunderbolt; more consequential than the gilded misery reserved for later sultans. The higher men rose in the empire, the closer they got to the bowstring; and the reign of Suleyman seems in retrospect coiled round with a silken garotte.

  On 31 August 1526 – that buoyant year for Ottoman arms, when the Sultan carried the day at Mohacs, annihilating Hungarian opposition – he penned this most depressing diary entry: ‘Rain falls in torrents. 2,000 prisoners executed.’ In his lifetime he pushed the borders of the empire further than ever before, but he may have realised, before he died, that he had found their limits, too. He was a poet and a fighter, a patron of the faith, and of the arts and sciences, a monarch who understood his duty, but he was more ruthless within his own borders than in enemy territory. He had his best friend murdered. On the death of one of his children he threw his turban on the ground, ripped off his jewels, stripped all the decorations from the walls of the palace and turned the carpets upside down, before he followed the coffin to its grave in a chariot drawn by weeping horses. Yet his son Mustafa was strangled by mutes whiles Suleyman watched from behind a screen: he had been given to believe that Mustafa was plotting a coup. Another son, Bayezit, saw the writing on the wall; he mounted the coup, was defeated, and fled to Persia from where, after negotiation, the Shah delivered him to Suleyman’s executioner. Suleyman left the empire to Selim, a drunkard, but Roxelana’s child. In his last years, his instinctive morbidity crowded out the high hopes and generosity of his
youth – he dressed plainly, dined off earthenware platters, and fostered the triumph of orthodox Islam, making the wisest mullah, the Grand Mufti of Constantinople, into a sort of Muslim Patriarch, in command of a new Islamic hierarchy. But when the Austrian ambassador took leave of Suleyman in his old age, it was scarcely a living being he described, but a sort of metaphor of empire, rotting and majestic, fat, made up, and suffering from an ulcerous leg.

  * This was constructed around the Fatih Camii, the Conqueror’s Mosque, which was entirely rebuilt after an earthquake in 1766; the complex included eight theological schools, a hospice, a soup kitchen, a hospital, a caravanserai for visiting merchants, a primary school, library, public bath, market and graveyard.

  * Habsburg Central Europe was, of course, an extension of the power of Habsburg Spain; Egypt lay close to the fabled Christian ‘empire’ of Abyssinia.

  * If anything, Lutheranism was the victor of the non-event: the incursions of Suleyman’s akinci, and Charles V’s first and only brush with the Turks on land, convinced the Emperor at last of the gravity of the threat, and of the need to reconcile himself with the Lutheran princes of Germany. Without this, the young faith might have been successfully suppressed.

  9

  Order

  In battle, said Kritovolos, men ‘slaughtered each other and mercilessly cut each other to pieces, charging and being charged, wounding and being wounded, killing and being killed, shouting, blaspheming, swearing, hardly conscious of anything that was happening or of what they were doing, just like madmen’. But the frenzy of battle is short-lived; soldiers are often the mildest of men; and the Ottomans themselves were not a confrontational people. They had no programme to implement beyond arranging for their own upkeep. They didn’t demand conversions to their faith. They didn’t insist on their own language. ‘The whole Policie is enlargement,’ a sixteenth-century observer deduced; and unlike a host of later imperialists, the Turks never asked themselves why other people could not be more like them.