Suleiman ruled longest of all Ottoman sultans, and wrote poetry too
For 46 years Suleiman commanded an empire of at least 25 million subjects, taking Belgrade and Rhodes and breaking Hungary at Mohács. Yet the sultan Europeans called Magnificent was also a poet, a trained goldsmith and a legal reformer, and he defied custom by marrying a woman from his own harem.
Suleiman was probably born on 6 November 1494 in Trabzon on the Black Sea, son of the future Selim I and Hafsa Sultan, a concubine of unknown origin who had converted to Islam. From the age of seven he studied science, history, literature, theology and tactics at Topkapı Palace, and at seventeen he began governing provinces, first Kaffa and then Manisa. A Venetian envoy who met him weeks after his accession in 1520 described a tall, slender, tough young man with a bony face, good humour and a love of reading.
He opened his reign with campaigns his great-grandfather Mehmed II had failed at. In August 1521 he surrounded Belgrade, bombarding it from an island in the Danube, and the city soon grew into the empire's second-largest European town. Rhodes fell in 1522, and victory at Mohács in 1526 shattered the Hungarian kingdom, much of which was absorbed into the empire. Failure before Vienna in 1529 halted his advance into Europe. He fought the Safavids of Iran for years and annexed Iraq, and his fleet controlled the seas from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
With his chief jurist Ebussuud Efendi he overhauled rules on education, taxation and crime, bringing sultanic law and Islamic law into one system. Oddly, the Turkish nickname Kanuni, the Lawgiver, appears in no sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Ottoman writing and may have arisen only in the 1700s. His reign also marked a golden age of Ottoman art, literature and architecture.
In 1534 he married Hürrem, a powerful figure from the imperial harem whose influence helped open the era known as the Sultanate of Women. His friend and adviser Pargalı Ibrahim, once a Greek slave, was eventually executed on his orders. Suleiman died on 6 September 1566, and Hürrem's son Selim II took the throne; historians now see what followed as a period of transformation rather than simple decline.
Source: Suleiman the Magnificent
