The Lawgiver's court

For 46 years Suleiman I ruled the Ottoman Empire from Belgrade to Baghdad. He was called Kanuni, the Lawgiver, for codifying Ottoman civil law across a multi-confessional empire. He wrote poetry to his wife Hurrem, walked Istanbul at night in disguise, and died in his tent at the last siege of a 46-year reign.

Suleiman ibn Selim I became the tenth Ottoman sultan in 1520 at 26. His father Selim I, called Yavuz (the Grim), had extended the empire in eight years to include Egypt, Syria, Iraq, the Hijaz, and Yemen. He had received the caliphate itself from the last Abbasid caliph in Cairo. Suleiman inherited a state that was already the largest Muslim empire in the world.

His reign was the longest of any Ottoman sultan, 46 years, from 1520 to 1566, and the apex of Ottoman power. He is called in Ottoman tradition Kanuni, the Lawgiver. He is called in European tradition the Magnificent. Both are accurate.

His military campaigns unfolded across decades. In 1521 he took Belgrade, which had resisted his great-grandfather Mehmed II. In 1522 he took Rhodes, expelling the Knights Hospitaller from the eastern Mediterranean after 213 years. In 1526 he destroyed the medieval kingdom of Hungary at Mohács in a single afternoon. In 1529 he besieged Vienna; he failed to take it but reached deeper into central Europe than any previous Muslim army. In 1534 he took Baghdad and Iraq from the Safavids. His admiral Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha made the Ottoman fleet dominant in the Mediterranean by 1538.

His domestic project, the reason he is called Kanuni, was the systematic codification of Ottoman civil law. The Ottoman legal system operated on two tracks: the Sharia, applied by the ulama for personal status, inheritance, and religious matters, and the Kanun, secular imperial law applied by the imperial administration for taxation, land tenure, criminal penalties, military organisation, and administrative procedure.

His code was intentionally designed to work across a multi-confessional empire. Non-Muslim subjects, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish, Coptic, Assyrian, Maronite, were organised into millets, self-governing religious communities with their own patriarchs and their own courts for internal affairs. Muslims were subject to Sharia and Kanun. Christian and Jewish subjects were subject to their own confessional law within their communities and to Kanun for imperial matters.

The system's tolerance was not absolute, it was hierarchical, with Muslims at the top, but it was, by the standards of sixteenth-century Europe, extraordinary. Suleiman received refugees from every Christian persecution of the century. When Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile expelled the Jews of Spain in 1492, Suleiman's grandfather Bayezid II had welcomed them. By Suleiman's reign the Sephardic Jewish population of Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir was one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.

Suleiman's private life is one of the most-documented of any sixteenth-century ruler. His marriage to Hurrem Sultan, the Ukrainian slave-consort who came to him as a captive in the 1520s, was against Ottoman precedent, sultans traditionally did not marry, taking their consorts as concubines. Suleiman not only married Hurrem but freed her, ended the harem system that had confined earlier sultans' consorts to Manisa, and moved her openly into the Topkapi palace in Istanbul.

His love poetry to her, written under the pen-name Muhibbi (the Loving), is preserved in the Ottoman divans. One of his best-known ghazals, addressed to her:

His architect was Mimar Sinan, the great Armenian-Christian-born, Muslim-convert master builder who spent 50 years designing the mosques, madrasas, aqueducts, caravanserais, hammams, and bridges that still define the skyline of Istanbul, Edirne, and Damascus. Sinan built 92 major mosques for Suleiman and his family. The Suleymaniye Mosque, above the Golden Horn in Istanbul, is Sinan's most-visited work; the Selimiye in Edirne, built for Suleiman's son Selim II, is Sinan's own masterpiece.

Suleiman walked Istanbul at night in disguise, listening for complaints against his own governors. He replaced governors on the basis of what he heard. The Ottoman archives preserve dozens of edicts from his hand written after nocturnal walks. His personal frugality was famous: he wore mended clothes, refused ostentation in his private quarters, and reserved imperial display for public ceremonies where its purpose was to project the empire's power to observing ambassadors.

His succession was marred by tragedy. His beloved eldest son Mustafa, the crown prince, popular with the army, was strangled by Suleiman's own order in 1553, on the basis of allegations that he was plotting against his father. The allegations came from Hurrem and from Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha, both of whom wanted the throne for Hurrem's sons. Whether the allegations were true is debated by historians for four centuries. Suleiman never spoke of the killing afterward. His remaining older son Bayezid was also killed, in Safavid Persia, in 1561, on Suleiman's order. Suleiman's surviving son Selim II inherited the throne in 1566, and was, by all Ottoman assessments, the worst of Suleiman's sons.

Suleiman died in his tent on 6 September 1566, at 71, during the siege of Szigetvár in Hungary. His Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha kept his death secret for 48 days while the siege was completed and Selim II was informed and secured. Suleiman's body was returned to Istanbul and buried in the mausoleum next to Hurrem, in the courtyard of the Suleymaniye Mosque. He is there today.

What the story teaches

Suleiman is remembered in Ottoman tradition for a specific combination that later Muslim rulers have found difficult to replicate: he was simultaneously a great conqueror and a great administrator. Most rulers are one or the other. Alexander conquered but did not administer. Umar administered but was not himself a conqueror at the scale of his generals. Suleiman did both. His legal code held the multi-confessional empire together for centuries. His military campaigns doubled its territory. And he did both while sustaining a private life that included love poetry to his wife and nocturnal walks to check on his governors' honesty. The classical Ottoman scholars take from Suleiman a doctrine about political greatness: it is not the sword alone, and it is not the pen alone. It is the sustained ability to hold both, and to hold both without losing the human being inside them. Suleiman's tomb next to Hurrem's is the reminder that the Lawgiver who ruled a quarter of the sixteenth-century world went home in the end to lie next to the woman he had loved and married against every precedent of his own dynasty.