by Alan Mikhail
Suleyman arrived at the imperial palace before his father’s corpse. His advisers quickly put him in a boat that would ferry him north along the Golden Horn to the Mosque of Eyüp. An estuary whose waters have served as the economic and political hub of Istanbul since the seventh century BCE, the Golden Horn lies immediately north of the peninsula on which the palace stands, where the Bosphorus meets the Sea of Marmara. Eyüp, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, died on the shores of the Golden Horn in the 670s, during the first Arab siege of what was then still the Byzantine capital. Given Eyüp’s personal connection to the Prophet, the mosque that was built around his tomb became sacred ground, and served as the traditional location of a sultan’s coronation.
Suleyman did his best to project a sultanic bearing as he stepped onto the dock. The Venetian bailo described him that year, at the age of twenty-five, as “tall and slender but tough, with a thin and bony face. Facial hair is evident but only barely.” A procession waited to honor him as he walked up to the mosque. Inside, a deep crimson carpet embroidered with a design of ornate blue flowers covered the floor. A dome—decorated with a design of white, blue, and red, even more ornate than the carpet beneath it—towered over the huge inner chamber. Gazing up at the dome, one was meant to feel something of heaven itself. Suleyman scanned this sanctum of inspiration and awe, and saw gathered there all of the imperial elite. He was escorted to one side of the open space, seized the sword of Osman that had been placed there for him, and thrust it high into the air. The assembled advisers, dignitaries, and secretaries bowed, declaring their allegiance to Suleyman as their sovereign.
The Ottoman Empire had its tenth sultan.
Suleyman receiving dignitaries after his ascension to the throne
WITH THE SYMBOLS OF imperial power now safely in Suleyman’s hands—the first time in Ottoman history that succession had occurred without fraternal struggle, just as Selim had envisioned—the sultan’s death was announced publicly. In Europe, the reaction was pure elation. The devil who had threatened Christian power in the western Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Indian Ocean was no more. In Selim’s place, they saw a coddled and untested young prince. Christian leaders knew Suleyman had been spared his father’s constant wars, and they rejoiced at the prospect that an inexperienced military strategist was now the Ottoman sultan. As Paolo Giovio, one of the Medicis’ official historians and author of Life of Leo X, as well as a book on the Ottoman Empire, wrote, “a furious lion had left a gentle lamb as his successor.”
Within the empire, critics of Selim invested profound meaning in the fact that he died in Çorlu. This was the town where he had met his father in battle, beginning the armed antagonism that would lead to the unprecedented event of a son deposing his father. Even eight years later, many considered Selim’s violent seizure of the Ottoman crown an illegitimate act. For them, Selim’s death at the very site of his sultanate’s original sin proved God’s contempt for him; it was evidence of his rule’s illegality and represented divine retribution for the evil he had invited into the empire.
When Janissary commanders and officers heard of Selim’s death, many threw themselves on the ground in sorrow. He had been their stalwart patron. Some pounded their heads on the earth. As the news circulated, a somber mood spread through the empire’s military corps. Coming to pay their respects to their deceased sovereign and to pledge their allegiance to their new sultan, “the army flowed into the capital like a silent river.”
Commoners, too, mourned their departed ruler. Large crowds of onlookers, many doleful, some merely curious, assembled at the city’s Edirne gate, waiting for Selim’s body to arrive. When the procession reached the walls, the new sultan stood ready to receive his father’s catafalque. With his mother, Hafsa, at his side, Suleyman kneeled by his father’s coffin, weeping and proclaiming his love for him. As a show of respect, he helped to carry the bier during part of the funeral cortege through the city to the Fatih Mosque, where Selim would lie in rest near his grandfather, Mehmet II. For the man who had given him so much—perhaps more than any sultan ever gave a prince—Suleyman willingly humbled himself as a sign of his love, gratitude, and devotion, sentiments not often felt between Ottoman royals.
Given the brevity of his time on the throne, and the even shorter amount of time he had spent in Istanbul during those eight years, Selim never had the opportunity to build the sort of sprawling mosque complex for himself that most previous sultans had made sure to do during their reigns. This task thus fell to Suleyman. He commissioned a mosque complex for his father in one of the city’s most resplendent locations—atop Istanbul’s fifth hill, in the Fatih district. Climbing the steep hill up to the mosque, one is rewarded with a sweeping view of the historic Golden Horn, the Topkapı Palace, and most of the city. On the northeastern slope lies one of the city’s largest Roman cisterns, the Cistern of Aspar. Selim’s granite and marble mosque boasts a hemispheric dome flanked by two slender, pencil-shaped minarets. Twenty-four smaller domes stand on a forest of columns in the courtyard outside. The complex also houses a school, a hospice, a garden, and a platform from which one can take in the expansive view.
Selim’s mosque
In 1528, Suleyman had Selim’s coffin transferred from the Fatih Mosque to the garden of the new mosque, in a small, private ceremony attended by his mother, some of his children, and his closest advisers. Still feeling vulnerable in the early years of his reign, Suleyman did not want public attention devoted to his father, so there was no procession, no ritual mourning, no military ceremony. Selim was interred in an octagonal mausoleum overlooking Topkapı Palace, as if to watch over his descendants for the next four centuries. Ironically enough, given his lifelong battle with the Safavids, Selim’s eternal home was adorned with tiles crafted by Iranian artisans then resident in the Ottoman Empire.
Almost six years later, on March 19, 1534, Hafsa died. Beloved within the palace as well as outside of it, “torrents of tears . . . poured forth when people learned of Hafsa’s death.” Selim’s death had rendered her legally free, and she became the first in a string of powerful mothers who governed alongside their sultan sons. For more than forty years—from her first administrative responsibilities in Trabzon in the 1490s to her death in Istanbul—Hafsa played a vital role in the governance of the empire. She was described as “the mother of the monarch, refuge of the world, the great woman whose whole work was piety, the [pure] woman whose every thought was good.” She had given birth to Suleyman when she was fifteen, and her one son bore her “great reverence and love,” as she had remained at his side throughout his life. Suleyman buried his mother next to Selim.
Extremely close to both his parents during their lives—but especially to his mother—Suleyman remained emotionally attached to them after their deaths. He regularly visited their tombs to pay his respects, reflect, and seek their spiritual advice and stewardship. He also stationed reciters of the Qur’an at their graves and oversaw several refurbishments of the complex during his forty-six-year reign.
IT WAS SULEYMAN WHO built his father’s mosque complex, and Selim who erected the imperial infrastructure that allowed Suleyman to become one of the most significant sultans in Ottoman history. Beyond ensuring for his one son perhaps the easiest succession of any of the empire’s thirty-six sultans, Selim laid the groundwork for Suleyman’s successes through the immense territorial expansion he achieved. More than any other single factor, Selim’s tripling of the size of the empire helps to explain the colossal effects of the Ottoman Empire on global history after 1517. Much of the magnificence ascribed to Suleyman’s reign—the longest of any sultan—derived, in part or in whole, from the Ottomans’ geographic supremacy. Suleyman took the throne as the first sultan to inherit a world empire.
Selim’s imperial expansion thrust the Ottomans into the center of early modern diplomacy and led, in turn, to the creation of vast collections of foreign documentation about the empire, as powers across the world searched for ways to counter the
Ottomans’ gargantuan military might. Suleyman inherited this elevated global diplomatic influence. Indeed, one of the reasons historians have devoted so much attention to Suleyman is the existence of these sources, in addition to a long record of his correspondence with European and other powers, as well as clandestine reconnaissance reports produced mostly by the Venetians, who were as likely to barter in gossip as in spices and silks. Given that many of these documents are written in European languages and preserved in European libraries, they were some of the earliest accessible sources for European historians writing about the Ottoman Empire—thus positioning Suleyman, more than Selim, at the center of Europe’s expanding knowledge of the empire and its history.
The Venetian sources draw a contrast between the personalities of father and son. At the time of his ascension to the throne in 1520, Suleyman was, according to the Venetian bailo, “friendly and in good humor,” a young man who “enjoys reading, is knowledgeable, and shows good judgement.” This stands against the much more dour picture of Selim offered by the previous bailo: “He reflects constantly; no one dares to say anything, not even the pashas who are there with him; he governs alone, on the basis of his own thinking.” Later, writing in the 1550s, the Italian historian Giovio, who had described Selim as a lion and Suleyman as a lamb, continued in this vein with the observation that Selim “shed more blood in his eight years of rule than Suleyman has in thirty.” No doubt to counter skepticism about his military acumen and aggressive character—skepticism that clearly lingered throughout his reign, as Giovio’s quip shows—Suleyman led two early and successful campaigns, seizing Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522.
Taking over his father’s empire, Suleyman could have been reckless or extravagant, more Nero than Augustus, and squandered his father’s gains by allowing his territorial inheritance to dissipate. Instead, he defended the empire’s recent acquisitions, converting most of them into permanent Ottoman holdings. In addition to his early successes in Belgrade and Rhodes, he scored major new victories, in Hungary at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 and in Iraq with the Peace of Amasya in 1555. He furthered his father’s efforts in the Indian Ocean against the Portuguese and fought several long wars against the Safavids. He also continued, unsuccessfully, to push westward in North Africa; Morocco remained tantalizingly close but, as always, unattained. For the most part, though, Suleyman’s “magnificence” derived from simply maintaining the territories his “grim” father had conquered.
Suleyman’s siege of Rhodes
More than Suleyman—more, in fact, than any of the other thirty-five sultans over the empire’s six centuries—Selim molded the Ottoman Empire into a global political and military force. Indeed, as historian Leslie Peirce observes, “Some Ottoman pundits would later call Selim’s reign a golden age.” In the five hundred years since Selim cast his broad shadow across the world, the contours of today’s Middle East and Mediterranean world largely remain those he set; the histories of the continents he united continue to follow paths he first cleared; and, sadly, the wars he started and led between his Sunni Ottomans and the Shiite Safavids have in some ways not ended. He, much more than Suleyman, was the most magnificent sultan in Ottoman history.
PART SEVEN
DESCENDANTS
(After 1520)
IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:
The view from Selim’s tomb
CHAPTER
24
SELIM’S REFORMATIONS
The four schools of Islamic law
WHILE SELIM’S MOST IMMEDIATE DESCENDANTS WERE, OF course, his one son, Suleyman, and his six daughters, we are all, in geopolitical terms, his heirs. Today, the world’s largest religions are Christianity and Islam, with the two faiths claiming over half of the earth’s population. Selim’s place in Islamic history is clear; less obvious is his fundamental importance to the history of Christianity, especially to the Reformation, that other event of global consequence that began in 1517, the year Selim defeated the Mamluks. Only by fully recognizing the catalytic role of the Ottoman Empire in the Reformation’s history—an influence usually overlooked or ignored—can this tectonic rift in Christianity be properly understood. As the sun rose in the east behind Selim’s stocky frame, it cast his shadow over a small German town on the river Elbe named Wittenberg.
In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, as we have seen, the world’s Muslim and Christian empires deliberately used religion to advance their political and ideological legitimacy. The Ottoman takeover of Mecca and Medina, the empire’s transformation from a majority Christian state to a majority Muslim one, and Selim’s union of sultanate and caliphate, all put Sunnism at the center of Ottoman imperial identity and weaponized it against the empire’s non-Sunni foes. In turn, the Safavids fused Shiism to their state primarily to distinguish themselves from the Ottomans (and other Sunni Muslims) in their rivalry for hegemony in the Muslim world. Christian Europe, similarly, made being non-Catholic not simply a subordinate status but an enemy one. After having targeted Jews and Muslims, Catholics made other Christians enemies in Europe, Native Americans enemies in the Americas, pagans and Muslims enemies in West Africa, and Hindus enemies in India.
Selim’s defeats of the Safavids and the Mamluks issued both a military and an ideological challenge to Europe. The Ottomans’ massive expansion in the second decade of the sixteenth century raised the pressing question of why they were able to ascend so dramatically while European powers seemed unable to stop them. Some began to wonder whether Europe’s comparative political and military weaknesses stemmed from moral failings; in an eschatological worldview, reversals of fortune were expressions of God’s judgment. The fear that Ottoman armies provoked in Europe prompted existential introspection, sowing fertile ground for challenges to the entrenched social, religious, and political order.
By far the most extensive and consequential of these critiques came from a young German priest named Martin Luther, who had almost become a lawyer. Islam extended to Luther vital ideological ammunition for the rhetorical guns he pointed at the Catholic Church. In targeting the Church, Luther would regularly cite Europe’s “Muslim other” in comparison. Usefully for Luther, the sultan—first Selim, then Suleyman—offered a potent means to critique the Medici-born Pope Leo X, whose moral depravity was, he suggested, what had enabled the Ottomans to spread Islam around the world. In Luther’s final analysis, the evils of the pope always exceeded the evils of the sultan.
While Luther unfailingly viewed the Ottomans as enemies, and Muslims as unbelievers, still he sought to understand them. He wrote reams about the Ottomans, whom he always referred to as “the Turks.” He studied Islam deeply, and even contemplated sponsoring the first German translation of the Qur’an. Many Islamic concepts, as we will see, would influence his own notions of religion. As one scholar explains it, “the ‘terrible Turk’ and his religion lurks in the shadows throughout all of Luther’s life.”
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE OTTOMAN defeat of the Safavids in 1514, Leo X called for a new Crusade. Ever since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, any victory that expanded Ottoman power—even one far removed from Europe—had sparked concern, because an increase in Ottoman strength amplified the threat the empire posed to Europe. (Recall that, at the end of the fifteenth century, Venice had sought an anti-Ottoman alliance with the Ak Koyunlu Confederacy of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus.) Selim’s victories over the Mamluks in 1516 and 1517—news of which spread like fire in European capitals through a network of spies, diplomats, and envoys—sent an even stronger shock wave through the continent. Though Catholic Europe had been organizing, or planning to organize, Crusades against the Muslim world for centuries, there had been no serious military confrontation for several decades. The balance of power had shifted so massively to the side of the Ottomans that it deterred European rulers from any thought of sending troops against them. Indeed, apart from a small war in Belgrade in 1456, Europe had not led a major Crusade against Islam since 1453, when the loss of Constantino
ple all but required a European response—and that, even so, was more bluster than reality. Thus, between 1453 and 1517, Ottoman power in the Mediterranean was able to expand essentially unchecked.
In this age of the Renaissance, Europeans focused more on the Ottomans than they did on the rediscovery of the classics, architectural adornment, or the artistic perfection of the human form. As one of the foremost historians of the Renaissance, James Hankins, again reminds us, “The humanists wrote far more often and at far greater length about the Turkish menace and the need for crusade than they did about such better-known humanist themes as true nobility, liberal education, the dignity of man, or the immortality of the soul.” “The bulk of humanist crusading literature,” he continues, “begins only after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.” The volume of work in this genre multiplied after major Ottoman victories such as the capture of Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, peaking with Selim’s conquests of 1516 and 1517. It subsided in 1571 with the epic Battle of Lepanto in the Ionian Sea, one of Europe’s few sixteenth-century victories against the Ottomans, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Othello and later in Verdi’s opera based on the play.
Christianity had never been so impotent. For Pope Leo and the Catholic Church, weakness soon morphed into panic and then outright hysteria. All sorts of rumors about the Ottomans and their potential military advances swirled through the Vatican. Vatican spies reported, for example, that Selim was reading the life of Alexander the Great for inspiration and direction. As the new Alexander, Selim seemed poised to unite the two Romes under the Ottoman crescent—a clear, if fantastical, end-of-days scenario for Christendom. In April 1516, several reports claimed that twenty-seven Ottoman ships had arrived off the coast of Civitavecchia, a port city near Rome with a recently completed defensive garrison, spurring a petrified Leo to flee the Vatican. No evidence exists to corroborate this purported sighting, and, given the Ottoman war effort in Syria that spring, it seems unlikely. In early 1517, at the very moment when Selim was entering Cairo, Leo interpreted lightning storms over Rome as an omen of impending doom. And, a few months later, just after the Mamluk conquest was completed, another forty Ottoman ships (almost certainly misidentified) were reportedly seen sailing through the Strait of Bonifacio, between Corsica and Sardinia. Thus, as the Ottomans occupied ever more territory around the Mediterranean, they occupied ever more of the European imagination.
