When Süleyman I, known in English as Suleiman, came to the throne in 1520, he inherited a treasury filled by his father's conquests and an army that had just beaten two empires. Europeans called him "the Magnificent." Ottomans remembered him as Kanuni, "the Lawgiver". He ruled from 1520 to 1566, longer than any other sultan, and later generations looked back on his reign as a golden age, often to criticize a more troubled present.

Conquests on two fronts

Suleiman struck first at Europe. He took Belgrade in 1521, opening the road up the Danube, and in 1522 forced the Knights of St John to surrender Rhodes, letting them sail away. Then came Hungary. At Mohács in 1526, Suleiman's army destroyed the Hungarian army, and King Louis II died during the retreat. Hungary was soon divided among the Habsburgs, a vassal Hungarian ruler and, later, direct Ottoman rule. In 1529 Suleiman pushed on to Vienna, the Habsburg capital. The first Ottoman siege of Vienna failed, and the army withdrew: it had arrived late in the season after a rain-soaked march, without its heaviest guns, and winter was coming.

Europe's politics gave him openings. The Habsburg Charles V ruled Spain, the Netherlands and much of Italy and Germany, and his rivals looked for help wherever they could find it. Suleiman allied with King Francis I of France against the Habsburgs, a partnership between a Muslim and a Catholic ruler that scandalized many Europeans. In the east he took Baghdad from the Safavids in 1534. At sea, the corsair admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa beat a Christian fleet at Preveza in 1538, making the Ottomans the leading naval power in the Mediterranean for a generation. Not every campaign succeeded: the great siege of Malta in 1565 failed. Suleiman died in 1566 while besieging the Hungarian fortress of Szigetvár.

The Lawgiver

Suleiman's Ottoman nickname points to something more lasting than battles. Kanun was the sultan's own administrative law, issued alongside the sharia, the religious law of Islam. Kanun covered matters the sharia left open or treated only in general terms: land tenure, tax rates, criminal penalties, market rules and the duties of officials. Earlier sultans had issued kanun too, but under Suleiman the codes were collected, revised and applied more systematically. The chief jurist Ebussuud Efendi worked to reconcile kanun with the sharia, issuing legal opinions that framed the sultan's laws in Islamic terms. The result was a dual legal order that gave the empire unusual consistency across very different provinces.

Family and power

The palace was not only a home but a center of politics. Suleiman's favorite was a woman known as Hürrem, called Roxelana by Europeans, who had been enslaved as a girl, probably in what is now Ukraine, and brought to the palace harem. Suleiman broke with tradition by freeing Hürrem and formally marrying her, something no sultan had done for generations. She corresponded with foreign rulers and founded charitable works in Istanbul, Mecca and Jerusalem. Her influence was resented, and rumors blamed her for the fall of Suleiman's grand vizier and boyhood friend Ibrahim Pasha, executed in 1536, and for the execution in 1553 of Mustafa, Suleiman's popular eldest son by another mother. How far she was really responsible is uncertain.

Sinan and the city

The age is still visible in stone. Mimar Sinan, born a Christian in central Anatolia around 1490, was recruited into the sultan's service, trained as a military engineer and served as chief imperial architect for about half a century. He and his office designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, schools, bridges, bathhouses and aqueducts. His Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul, completed in 1557, dominates the skyline. Sinan regarded the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, finished in the 1570s, as his masterpiece, its single great dome resting on eight supports over a vast open space.

Worked example: reading the Süleymaniye

A building can be read like a document. Start with what the Süleymaniye contains. Around the mosque stood colleges for religious learning, a medical school, a hospital, a soup kitchen that fed students and the poor, a bathhouse, shops, and the tombs of Suleiman and Hürrem. The complex was paid for by a charitable endowment, so its upkeep came from rents and lands set aside forever.

Now ask what it says. The vast dome and its placement on a hill above the Golden Horn announce power that anyone in the city could see. The colleges and hospital present the sultan as protector of learning and the poor, which fits the old idea that a ruler earns his right to rule by providing justice and welfare. The scale invites comparison with Hagia Sophia nearby, a claim to equal or surpass the Roman past. The shops and endowment show how piety, charity and commerce were woven together. A single complex thus teaches the political theory of the age: power justified by faith, made visible in architecture and paid for by a system designed to outlast the man who built it.