Survival of the cruellest in 16th-century Constantinople

The 16th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Suleyman liked to impose himself on foreign monarchs from the start, always beginning official letters with the uncompromising assertion: ‘I am the great lord and conqueror of the whole world.’ In this sparkling account of his middle years, the second in an ambitious three-volume biography, Christopher de Bellaigue never actually describes Suleyman as ‘the magnificent’, his most widely known epithet. But he certainly conjures up his awesome presence at home and abroad in animated prose saturated with vivid colour and detail.

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So, in 1538, we encounter the sultan in his mid-forties, a swan-necked figure in a white lozenge-shaped turban, riding to war in the Balkans. Surrounded by trumpeters, kettle-drummers and white-plumed archers, he leads a well-resourced army which includes 12,000 janissaries in billowy Hungarian-style trousers. These are his murderously efficient infantrymen, who have been snatched from mainly Christian villages, raised communally as quasi-slaves and forbidden to marry, so that they owe allegiance to no one but him.

A decade earlier, he carried all before him as he extended his territory. But in 1529, after successes in Hungary, he failed to press home his advantage against his enduring rival the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and was beaten back from the gates of Vienna. Now, in 1538, he was on the march again. Angered by Portuguese incursions in the Indian Ocean, which he regarded as his backyard, he (or rather his henchman, the eunuch Hadim Suleyman, who had made a good job of governing Egypt) mounted an invasion of Gujarat. Although unsuccessful there, the Ottomans at least managed to consolidate their positions in Yemen and the Red Sea.