suleiman--7/30/26

30 Jul 2026

suleiman--7/30/26

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Today's encore selection-- from Islam by John Tolan. Suleiman the Magnificent and His Successors.

“Selim's son, Suleiman I ‘the Magnificent’ (1520-1566), continued, in his father's wake, to expand the empire. He made conquests in the Balkans; he took territory from the Safavids, including Baghdad; his navy was active in Yemen and the Persian Gulf. He forged alliances with Muslim princes in the Maghreb, East Africa, India, and Sumatra. He saw himself as a universal emperor and patronized artists and scholars, making his court into a flourishing center of culture and learning.

“Suleiman led an expedition that conquered Belgrade in 1521. The following year, he was at the head of the Ottoman fleet that captured the island of Rhodes. In 1526 he undertook the conquest of Hungary. He besieged Vienna in 1529 but the tenacity of the Austrian defense, coupled with torrential rains, obliged him to withdraw. In the following years, Ottoman armies annexed much of Hungary; in 1541 Buda became the capital of Ottoman Hungary. In his struggle against the Habsburgs, Suleiman could rely on Hungarian Protestants, who had suffered persecution at the hands of the Catholic emperors. In the principality of Transylvania, a federated state within the Ottoman Empire, Catholics, Protestants, and Unitarians were all free to practice their religions.Francois I, king of France (1515-1547), allied himself with Suleiman, better to outwit their common enemy, Emperor Charles V. France became the principal European ally of the Sublime Porte, with regular exchanges of ambassadors who negotiated political and economic accords.

“The Mediterranean was also a theater of conflict between the Ottomans (and their French allies) and the Habsburgs. Spain captured Algiers in 1510 and built a fortress to control the city. In 1516 its inhabitants revolted against the Spaniards and called on the Turkish corsair Hayreddin Barberousse, who made Algiers into an Ottoman protector. In 1534, Barberousse captured Tunis from the last Hafsid sultan, Moulay Hassan, who enlisted the help of Charles V. The emperor and his admiral Andrea Doria, with a fleet of 250 ships, took the city; Barberousse retreated to Algiers. Tunis was sacked for the second time in a year, and the Spanish put Moulay Hassan back on his throne, now as a vassal of the Habsburg emperor. In the years that followed, French and Ottoman fleets fought together against the Habsburgs and their allies, in particular during the Italian wars between Franc;ois and Charles. The Ottoman fleet helped France conquer Corsica in 1553.

‘The Habsburgs played a similar game, negotiating an alliance with the principal enemy of the Ottomans, Safavid Shah Tahrnasp I (1524-1576), son and successor of lsmail I. Beginning in 1532 the Safavids conquered territory in Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia, but the Ottoman army, led by vizier Ibrahim Pasha, launched a counteroffensive and took Baghdad in 1534. In a new campaign in 1548-1549 the Ottomans conquered Safavid territory in the Caucasus and advanced to Tabriz. The Ottoman armies and their allies extended their power everywhere, it seemed: the capture of Aden in 1538 opened the way for Ottoman domination of Yemen. The Sultanate of Adal (corresponding to what is today Djibouti and part of Somalia) allied itself with the Ottomans, who helped them in their war against Ethiopia; in 1552 the Ottoman fleet took the port of Muscat (today the capital of Oman). The Ottomans and their allies in the region had to confront a new naval power, Portugal, as we will see below.

Suleiman by Nakkaş Osman (painted in 1579)

“In Turkish tradition, Suleiman is called ‘Kanuni,’ the legislator. Few previous Muslim sovereigns prided themselves on being legislators because the divine law or sharia, supposed to come from God, was interpreted by jurists. Suleiman chaired a council of jurists who drafted and compiled a new code of law for a growing empire with universal pretensions, the Kanun Osmani, Ottoman Laws, through which he attempted to assert the centralizing power of the sultan. Suleiman presents himself in the preamble to one of these codes of laws as a saint, friend of God and the prophets, which confers upon him the authority to legislate. According to Ottoman propaganda, Suleiman was the messianic ruler who would unite the world under his universal power before the year 1000 of the Muslim calendar (1591/ 1592), imbued with a holiness that surpassed even that of Ibn Arabi. Emperor of Constantinople, he also presented himself as Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of the Romans, legitimate heir of the Roman Empire against his Habsburg rival, Charles V. Jean Bodin, jurisconsult and advisor to the king of France, proclaimed that only Suleiman could claim the imperial title and mocked the pretensions of Charles V.

“Suleiman was a great patron of the arts. He was also a poet, writing in Turkish and Persian, in particular love poems for his wife and favorite, Hurrem. He renovated mosques and sanctuaries in the holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, as well as in other cities of the empire. He legislated that every village where Muslims lived must have a mosque. He had the Siileymaniye Mosque, one of the architectural jew els of the capital, built by the great architect Sinan. It is behind this mosque that we find his tomb, alongside Hurrem's. The Sufi orders retained their importance during the reigns of Suleiman and his successors. Mehmed Ebussuud Efendi, Sheikh al-Islam (1545-1574), was asked whether the ritual dances of Sufi dervishes were permitted (halal); he responded in the affirmative in a fatwa in Turkish: ‘Knowledge of Divine Truth is a limitless ocean. The sharia is its shore.We are the people of the shore. The great Sufi masters are the divers in that limitless ocean. We do not argue with them.’

“Suleiman's armies were besieging the Hungarian city of Szigetvar when he died on 6 September 1566. None of the subsequent sultans would make conquests comparable to those of Selim I and Suleiman, but the Ottoman Empire remained the superpower of Europe and the Middle East. During the reign of Mehmed III (1595-1603), the principal threat to the empire came from the Safavids. Shah Abbas I (1588-1629) transferred the capital to Isfahan. Merchants and dignitaries from all over the empire flocked there: Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, speaking Armenian, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and many other languages. Abbas built his capital there next to the medieval town, around a large square, a sumptuous theater to host the staging of rites glorifying his power. He built a large covered bazaar, palaces, mosques. The architectural style, inspired by both Persian tradition and the architecture of Central Asia, is marked in particular by sparkling white and blue ceramic tiles.

“Starting in 1603, Abbas made conquests at the expense of the Ottomans in the Caucasus; he took the Armenian city of Julfa and brought its Christian population to Isfahan, where he gave them a neighborhood where they built churches (which are still active today). He gave them permission to produce wine for their consumption, but in fact the Armenians of Julfa became the suppliers of wine to the capital. These churches, as well as synagogues, reflect the dynasty's practice of tolerance toward dhimmis; Sunnis were less tolerated. In 1624, Abbas took Baghdad. The Ottoman Sultan Murad IV besieged the former Abbasid capital, which he finally recaptured in 1638. On 17 May 1639, Safi, son of Abbas, signed with Murad the Treaty of Zuhab, in which the Safavids ceded Mesopotamia to the Ottomans. The treaty traces a border between two empires, established for political and military reasons specific to the seventeenth century—a border almost identical to that which separates Iran from Iraq today, an accident of history that corresponds to neither religious nor ethnic boundaries.

“Mehmed IV (1648-1687) turned toward Europe, allying with the Cossack state of Petro Doroshenko to attack Poland and Russia. On 14 July 1683, he laid siege to Vienna.Jan Sobieski, king of Poland, came to attack the Ottoman army. On 12 September, a decisive battle took place in which the armies of the Habsburgs and Poles defeated the Ottomans, who were forced to withdraw. This was the last Ottoman attempt to take Vienna and marked the beginning of the decline of Ottoman power in Central Europe. For Mehmed, it was disgrace. Four years later he was deposed.

“Murad IV and Mehmed IV had embraced the movement of the Kadizadelis, pietists who, like certain Protestants in Europe at the same time, advocated a puritanical vision of religion. They were hostile to Sufis and wanted to ban music, dancing, prostitution, and alcohol. In Istanbul, cafes were closed and the Kadizadelis had prostitutes and women living alone driven out of certain neighborhoods. During the reign of Mustafa II, the Kadizelite preacher Feyzullah became sheikhu- lislam, the main religious authority of the empire. He convinced the sultan to make Kadizalism the official doctrine of the empire and to create a sort of religious police that would monitor the adherence of Muslims to his puritanical doctrine, respect for good morals, and performance of ritual. This provoked a revolt in Constantinople that resulted in the death of Feyzullah, the dissolution of the Kadizadelis, and the deposition of the sultan. The Ottoman Empire was no longer a threat to Christian Europe; as we will see in the next chapter, on the contrary, the empire began to plunge into internal struggles and lose territories to rebels and European powers, until in the nineteenth century it became ‘the sick man of Europe.’’