About this ebook
In 1520, a twenty-six-year-old sultan ascended the Ottoman throne. Over a forty-six-year reign, ending with his death before a Hungarian fortress in September 1566, he commanded armies of one hundred thousand men, rewrote the empire's legal code, and presided over a golden age whose monuments still shape Istanbul's skyline. Known to his own people as the Lawgiver and to Europe as Suleiman the Magnificent, his reign began with an apprenticeship in provincial Trabzon in 1494 and ended with his death concealed by his Grand Vizier so a siege could be completed in his name.
The book covers the destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary at Mohács on 29 August 1526; the 1529 siege of Vienna, where sixteen thousand defenders held the city against the Ottoman army; the rise of Hürrem Sultan, a Ukrainian slave who became a legal wife and reshaped the imperial household; the career of the corsair admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, whose victory at Preveza in 1538 contested Habsburg naval dominance in the Mediterranean; and the execution of Suleiman's firstborn son in October 1553, the product of three decades of Ottoman succession politics.
Sources include the Ottoman Kanunname legal archives, Venetian Baili dispatches, Tahrir Defterleri cadastral surveys, the letters of ambassador Busbecq, and Suleiman's own Divan poetry.
In 1520, a twenty-six-year-old sultan ascended the Ottoman throne. Over a forty-six-year reign, ending with his death before a Hungarian fortress in September 1566, he commanded armies of one hundred thousand men, rewrote the empire's legal code, and presided over a golden age whose monuments sti...
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