A036 - Suleyman the Magnificent

 Suleyman I

Suleyman I (Qanuni) (Suleyman the Magnificent) (Süleyman the Lawgiver) (Süleyman Muhteşem) (Kanuni) (b. November 6, 1494–April 1495 — d. September 5/6, 1566, near Szigetvár, Hungary).  Greatest of the Ottoman sultans.  Peace loving by nature, he took part in thirteen great campaigns in Europe and Asia.  In 1521, he conquered Belgrade and the next year the island of Rhodes.  In 1526, the Hungarians were defeated at Mohacs and Buda was temporarily occupied.   1529 saw the siege of Vienna, which was however raised soon.  The various embassies to Austria had no success, and in 1532 Suleyman started upon what the Turkish sources call “the German campaign against the king of Spain.”  However, in 1533, an armistice was concluded with Austria.

Suleyman’s next campaign was directed against Persia, which avoided the battle.  In 1534, the sultan made his ceremonial entrance in Baghdad, where he stayed for four months and built the mausoleum of Abu Hanifa.  He also visited Najaf, Kufa and Karbala’.  In 1541 and 1543, he was again in Hungary, where Turkish administration was introduced.  The war against Persia was resumed in 1548 but without success, and in 1555 a treaty was concluded at Amasia, where Suleyman received the Austrian embassy under Ogier Giselin de Busbecq.  It could only obtain an armistice.  The sultan died during the siege of Szigeth.

Suleyman was a pious man, and must have been a born ruler.  As a poet, he used the pen-name of Muhibbi.  Following the principles of his predecessors, he elaborated the system of state institutions by promulgating the “Canon,” which deals mainly with the organization of the army, the laws of landed property, the police and the feudal code.  During his reign, the Ottoman Empire established its place in international affairs.  The Christian states had lost all hope of driving the Turks out of Europe, and King Francis concluded an alliance with the Ottoman sultan.  The Turkish fleet began to be active in the Mediterranean, in the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean.  The possession of Aden and Yemen was secured for the empire.

Under Suleyman, Ottoman civilization gained its own special character in the field of literature and especially in that of architecture with the works of Sinan in Istanbul, Baghdad, Konya, Jerusalem and Mecca.

A chronology of Suleyman’s life reads as follows:

Suleyman was born in November of 1494 as the only son of Sultan Selim I.

Early in the sixteenth century, Suleyman became sacak beyi, the governor of Kaffa in the Crimea. 

Around 1512, Suleyman moved to Anatolia, where he became governor in Manisa.

In 1520, following the death of his father, Suleyman became the new sultan.  He immediately set out on campaigns against the Christian powers in Europe.

In 1521, Belgrade (today’s Serbia) fell to the Ottomans.

In 1522, the island of Rhodes fell to the Ottomans.  This meant the end of the rule of the Knights of St. John. 

In 1526, Suleyman struck a final defeat on the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs.  Their king was killed, and Suleyman supported the new king John.  John became the vassal king under the Ottomans.

In 1529, Suleyman started a short-lived and unsuccessful siege to Vienna.

In 1532, there was an important victory against Austria, where Ottoman forces looted large parts of the country.  However, Austria still was not put under direct Ottoman rule, as the sultan was mainly occupied with his Asian neighbors at this time.

In 1534, a campaign was launched against Persia.

In 1535, both Iraq and the region of Erzurum was conquered after the defeat of the Persians.

In 1538, the Ottomans won the sea battle off Preveza under the leadership of Khayr ud-Din, known in Europe as Barbarossa.  This made the Ottomans the leading power in the Mediterranean Sea.

From 1541 to 1562, there was a war in Hungary that led to few changes in the situation with regards to Ottoman dominance.
In 1548, a second campaign was launched against Persia. 

In 1549, the region around Van Lake came under Ottoman control. 

In 1551, Tripoli fell to the Ottomans, giving the empire control over all of the eastern Mediterranean coast from today’s Macedonia to southern Tunisia (including today’s Greece (EU), Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Libya.)

In 1553, Suleyman’s son, Mustafa, rebelled against his father’s rule and received many supporters in Anatolia. Suleyman’s reaction was to have Mustafa executed.

In 1554, a third campaign was launched against Persia.

In 1555, a formal peace was signed between the Safavids of Persia and the Ottomans, without substantial changes in the borders between the states.

In 1559, two other sons of Suleyman, Selim and Bayazid, began fighting over the succession to the sultanate.

In 1560, a strong Spanish campaign against Jerba was crushed by Ottoman troops.  Suleyman’s son Bayazid was executed, leaving Selim heir of the sultanate.

In 1565, the Ottomans do not succeed in capturing Malta from the Knights of St. John.

On September 5, 1566, Suleyman died near Szigetvar in Hungary.

Süleyman I, as the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566, not only undertook bold military campaigns that enlarged his realm, he also oversaw the development of what came to be regarded as the most characteristic achievements of Ottoman civilization in the fields of law, literature, art, and architecture.

Süleyman was the only son of Sultan Selim I. He became sancak beyi (governor) of Kaffa in the Crimea during the reign of his grandfather Bayezid II and of Manisa in western Asia Minor in the reign of Selim I.

Süleyman succeeded his father as sultan in September 1520 and began his reign with campaigns against the Christian powers in central Europe and the Mediterranean. Belgrade fell to him in 1521 and Rhodes, long under the rule of the Knights of St. John, in 1522. At Mohács, in August 1526, Süleyman broke the military strength of Hungary, and the Hungarian king, Louis II, lost his life in the battle.

The vacant throne of Hungary was claimed by Ferdinand I, the Habsburg archduke of Austria, and by John (János Zápolya), who was voivode (lord) of Transylvania, and the candidates of the “native” party opposed to the prospect of Habsburg rule. Süleyman agreed to recognize John as a vassal king of Hungary, and in 1529, hoping to remove at one blow all further intervention by the Habsburgs, he laid siege to Vienna. Difficulties of time and distance and of bad weather and lack of supplies, no less than the resistance of the Christians, forced the sultan to raise the siege.

The campaign was successful, however, in a more immediate sense, for John was to rule thereafter over most of Hungary until his death, in 1540. A second great campaign in 1532, notable for the brilliant Christian defense of Güns, ended as a mere foray into Austrian border territories. The sultan, preoccupied with affairs in the East and convinced that Austria was not to be overcome at one stroke, granted a truce to the archduke Ferdinand in 1533.

The death of John in 1540 and the prompt advance of Austrian forces once more into central Hungary drove Süleyman to modify profoundly the solution that he had imposed in the time of John. His campaigns of 1541 and 1543 led to the emergence of three distinct Hungarys—Habsburg Hungary in the extreme north and west; Ottoman Hungary along the middle Danube, a region under direct and permanent military occupation by the Ottomans and with its main center at Buda; and Transylvania, a vassal state dependent on the Porte and in the hands of John Sigismund, the son of John Zápolya.

Between 1543 and 1562 the war in Hungary continued, broken by truces and with few notable changes on either side. The most important was the Ottoman capture of the Banat of Temesvár (Timişoara) in 1532. After long negotiations a peace recognizing the status quo in Hungary was signed in 1562.

Süleyman waged three major campaigns against Persia. The first (1534–35) gave the Ottomans control over the region of Erzurum in eastern Asia Minor and also witnessed the Ottoman conquest of Iraq, a success that rounded off the achievements of Selim I. The second campaign (1548–49) brought much of the area around Lake Van under Ottoman rule, but the third (1554–55) served rather as a warning to the Ottomans of the difficulty of subduing the Ṣafavid state in Persia. The first formal peace between the Ottomans and the Ṣafavids was signed in 1555, but it offered no clear solution to the problems confronting the Ottoman sultan on his eastern frontier.

The naval strength of the Ottomans became formidable in the reign of Süleyman. Khayr al-Dīn, known in the West as Barbarossa, became kapudan (admiral) of the Ottoman fleet and won a sea fight off Preveza, Greece (1538), against the combined fleets of Venice and Spain, which gave to the Ottomans the naval initiative in the Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Tripoli in North Africa fell to the Ottomans in 1551. A strong Spanish expedition against Tripoli was crushed at Jarbah (Djerba) in 1560, but the Ottomans failed to capture Malta from the Knights of St. John in 1565. Ottoman naval power was felt at this time even as far afield as India, where a fleet sent out from Egypt made an unsuccessful attempt in 1538 to take the town of Diu from the Portuguese.

The later years of Süleyman were troubled by conflict between his sons. Mustafa had become by 1553 a focus of disaffection in Asia Minor and was executed in that year on the order of the sultan. There followed during 1559–61 a conflict between the princes Selim and Bayezid over the succession to the throne, which ended with the defeat and execution of Bayezid. Süleyman himself died while besieging the fortress of Szigetvár in Hungary.

Süleyman surrounded himself with administrators and statesmen of unusual ability, men such as his grand viziers (chief ministers) İbrahim, Rüstem, and Mehmed Sokollu. ʿUlamāʾ (specialists in Islamic law), notably Abū al-Suʿūd (Hoca Çelebi) and Kemalpaşazade, made the period memorable, as did the great Turkish poet Bâkî and the architect Sinan. Süleyman built strong fortresses to defend the places he took from the Christians and adorned the cities of the Islamic world (including Mecca, Damascus, and Baghdad) with mosques, bridges, aqueducts, and other public works. In general, Süleyman completed the task of transforming the previously Byzantine city of Constantinople into Istanbul, a worthy center for a great Turkish and Islamic empire.

Suleyman’s regime was marked by strong territorial advances in North Africa, central Europe, Bessarabia and Iraq.  However, he also oversaw great advances in fields like law, literature, art and architecture.  His nickname, Kanuni, is best translated into “the Lawgiver,” indicating his importance in these fields.

Suleyman put strong emphasis on building strong fortresses to defend captured Christian cities, and he improved the infrastructure of many cities in the Muslim world, like Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad.  However, most remarkable was that during his time, Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, was fully transformed into a Muslim city through its new organization, architecture and institutions.

At the time of Suleyman's death the Ottoman Empire, with its unrivaled military strength, economic riches and territorial extent, was the world's foremost power. Suleyman's conquests had brought under the control of the Empire the major Muslim cities (Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad), many Balkan provinces (reaching present day Croatia and Austria), and most of North Africa. His expansion into Europe had given the Ottoman Turks a powerful presence in the European balance of power. Indeed, such was the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire under the reign of Suleyman that many believed that the Ottoman conquest of Europe was imminent.

Even thirty years after his death "Sultan Solyman" was quoted by the English author William Shakespeare as a military prodigy in The Merchant of Venice (Act 2, Scene 1).

Suleyman's legacy was not, however, merely in the military field. The administrative and legal reforms which earned Suleyman the name Law Giver ensured the Empire's survival long after his death, an achievement which took many generations of decadent heirs to undo.

Through his personal patronage, Suleiman also presided over the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire, representing the pinnacle of the Ottoman Turks' cultural achievement in the realm of architecture, literature, art, theology and philosophy. Today, the skyline of the Bosphorus, and of many cities in modern Turkey and the former Ottoman provinces, are still adorned with the architectural works of Mimar Sinan. One of these, the Süleymaniye Mosque, is the final resting place of Suleyman and Herenzaltan. They are buried in separate domed mausoleums attached to the mosque.



Qanuni see Suleyman I
Suleyman the Magnificent see Suleyman I
Suleyman the Lawgiver see Suleyman I
Suleyman Muhtesem see Suleyman I
Kanuni see Suleyman I