Peerless among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman with Kaya Şahin

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I'm joined by author and historian Kaya Shahin. Kaya is Associate Professor of History and the Executive Associate Dean of the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. And he is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire with a particular interest in history writing, governance, religious and confessional identity, and ceremonies and rituals. Today, though, we are talking all about his new book, Peerless Among Princes, The Life and Times of Sultan Suleiman, published by Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me today. It is a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate your invitation and the opportunity of talking about my book. I'm so excited to talk to you all about your new book, so why don't we start with what it's all about? Okay, so the title is Peerless Among Princes, The Life and Times of Sultan Suleiman. So it is the biography of an Ottoman ruler who was Sultan from 1520 to 1566. So it is a biography, but at the same time, I wrote it as a life and times type of biography. So there's a lot of information about political and cultural developments in the Middle East and in the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the 16th century. So in addition to the individual, I basically wanted to talk about a collective story of empire building. It has many characters in it, both on the Ottoman side, as well as among the rivals of the Ottomans. So I tried to inject as many other individuals as I could into the narrative, as well as, as I said, providing a wider story of empire building and regional and global history in the 16th century. Wow, incredible. So I don't actually physically have the book on me, but I'm assuming that it's quite big. The book, I think I received it, but I had to give it as a gift to someone. So I don't have a copy of my own book with me. I have the PDF file. It's around 350 pages, 370 pages with notes and bibliography. I also thought it would be a good idea to add a full color insert in the middle in which I use different depictions of Suleiman. There are a couple of, I think, European depictions of him, but mostly Ottoman and mostly from the 16th century. So I kind of also wanted to give my readers a sense of how his contemporaries have seen and saw and represented Suleiman. So as I jokingly say, you have the book and then you also have the comic book version in the middle. So it's a two for one. That's so cool. Did you find that the depictions of Suleiman changed depending on, you know, through time or the types of people that were depicting him? Yeah. So the depictions do change. And this is one of the reasons why I stayed close to 16th century depictions. A lot of the, I would say the majority of the European representations of Suleiman were done by artists who did not see him. But at the same time, those are artists who had seen other more realistic depictions of Suleiman. They did a better job with, you know, clothing items and this and that. On the Ottoman side, again, I mean, when we look at the 16th century artists, we see a sort of more of an emphasis on, you know, Suleiman and his surroundings and material culture, his, you know, the different stages of his life. For instance, we can see him age in these 16th century works. He goes from a younger man to a middle-aged person and to an older person. So there's a sense of reality of love, of the passing of time, which kind of, you know, disappears in later depictions, which become more idealized or, you know, which try to kind of represent him in a single image that represents wisdom or martial values or something like that. While the 16th century depictions, especially the Ottoman ones, basically give you a kind of a more intimate and more detailed, more changing, more varied version of Suleiman. That's pretty incredible because I feel like especially with rulers, you get, you tend to get the same image, you know, with different clothes or whatever, because they do want to portray a specific ideology or, yeah. So that's very cool that we can sort of see that passage of time in the images. Did you want to just briefly tell us a little bit about Suleiman and the time period that he lived in and ruled in? Sure. So Suleiman was born in 1494 or 1495, we don't have the exact birth date, could be either one of the two. He was born, what was then a small town on the Black Sea coast, the eastern, the southeastern part of the Black Sea coast, in the city of Trabzon. The city still exists today and actually, if you were to visit Trabzon, you will be able to see the old sort of Ottoman city, which a good part of it has been preserved. It's kind of on top of a hill going up from the seaside. At the time Suleiman was born, this was a small city, I call it a town in the book, population around, you know, six to eight thousand. He was there as the son of a prince, his father was a prince. His grandfather was the ruler of the Ottoman Empire when Suleiman was born. So Suleiman grew up in Trabzon and then he received an appointment as a district governor himself when he was in his early teens, as was the custom of the Ottomans. And then during that time, his father waged a major succession struggle against the reigning sultan, which was Suleiman's grandfather and Suleiman's father's father. And Suleiman's father basically prevailed, as a result of which Suleiman became heir apparent. And then in 1520, as his father died, he came to the throne unopposed. But he basically spent the first part of his life under the stress of these kinds of things, you know, life in a relatively small town in an isolated part of the Ottoman realm. The succession struggles that his father waged, I speculate a little bit about this in the book, but he must have thought oftentimes that, you know, he was bound to be executed by one of their rivals, because his father was not, you know, at first sight, his father was not the wealthiest or the most powerful claimant to the throne in the 1510s. After he became to the throne as the only candidate, he went through a sort of period of transition during which he tried to prove himself, he tried to create a kind of a martial reputation for himself, he also tried to create a reputation for himself as a just ruler. So we see him trying to get from under the shadow of his father, who was a very famous and accomplished military commander. And then after the first couple of years of transition, we see Suleiman execute a fairly radical transformation of the upper echelons of the Ottoman elite, he basically, you know, starts kicking out the old guard and replacing them with his own creatures. And this is also the time in which he starts developing a fairly ambitious imperial agenda around 1524, 1525, 1526, he basically takes on the already circulating, you know, rumors or bits of information about, you know, the arrival of the end time, apocalypticism, you know, the pending emergence of a messianic leader who was supposedly going to, you know, lead humanity into a new age of salvation and all of that sort of stuff. So there's a period from 1525 onwards, during which he basically starts speculating with these kinds of ideas, basically, he creates around himself, a discourse of universal monarchy. And he basically fights against, he competes with the Habsburgs on the European front, both around the control of Eastern and Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, but also around ideas like, you know, who is the true emperor, I mean, this, this may come quite surprising to, you know, a lot of listeners who are well versed in European history, because they would be familiar with these kinds of ideas, like the notion of a lost emperor, this and that from European history. But Suleyman's period is a time in which the Ottomans also basically start using these kinds of ideas in their ideological speculations and in their political claims against the Habsburgs. So Suleyman basically engages in a very intense struggle with the Habsburgs in the second half of the 1520s and basically to the end of his reign in 1566, but the 1520s and 1530s, up to the mid 1540s, this is kind of the high point of his competition with the Habsburgs. He also has a another rival further east, the Safavids of Iran. Now, this is a Muslim political entity, but the Safavids are Shiites, they are not Sunnis, while the Ottomans are Sunnis. So Suleyman also develops kind of a new notion of the leadership of the Sunni Muslim community under the mantle of the Ottoman Sultan, and just as he competes with the Habsburgs, both for strategic reasons as well as for ideological reasons, he also competes with the Safavids, again pretty much to the end of his reign, around these kinds of ideological, political, and religious claims about who represents the more righteous version of Islam, who is the rightly guided and genuine leader of the Muslim community. Those kinds of things, those kinds of speculations are very, very important in his political life. And this is an agenda that he obviously inherits from others, but we can see that he was himself quite adamant about developing and about furthering this agenda. I'm going on quite a lot about this to underline the fact that, you know, these pre-modern rulers, we usually have a patronizing understanding of them as being less sophisticated than, you know, a modern politician or modern cultural figures. I am saying this to basically underline that, you know, this is again a time in which, you know, there are these very complicated, very sophisticated cultural and political competitions, and also again another assumption that we encounter oftentimes in the modern period is that East and West, Muslims and Christians, you know, did not have a substantial dialogue or anything like that. Again, the life of Suleiman is proof to the contrary. I mean, you really see, you see it especially, you know, in things like the accounts, daybooks, reports of the Habsburg envoys who come to Constantinople in the 1520s and 1530s, you do see that, you know, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, you know, Christians and Muslims, Europeans and non-Europeans basically did have a lot of, you know, sophisticated and substantive discussions about these kinds of issues. But to go back to Suleiman, and then, I mean, and I wrote the book chronologically from beginning to end for a couple of things. I wanted to talk about his childhood, because almost nobody talks about his childhood, but I also kind of wanted to talk about his life by following the natural cycle of, you know, a human life. So going back to your initial question, you know, about Suleiman, so after doing all this difficult childhood, he comes to the throne, ideological speculations and this and that, and then in the, starting with the early 1540s, he kind of hits middle age, and the imperial project that he manages and supervises in the previous decades kind of also becomes, I don't want to call it less dynamic, but I would say less experimental. So in the middle age, he enters a kind of period of institutionalization, and he starts thinking about his legacy. So he basically emerges as a major patron of charitable works. He supervises the composition of a major illustrated work of history that narrates the story of his reign, and this is a work that's completed in the late 1550s, but we know that, you know, the conception begins in the mid-1540s. He has a major mosque and a charitable complex around it built to his name. It is called the Suleymaniye Mosque, and you know, you can still visit it in Istanbul, and it is still an equally impressive building. So in the sort of middle age, in the second half of his life, he starts building this legacy. The Ottoman Empire basically becomes more institutionalized in the sense that, you know, the bureaucratic apparatus expands. The legal institution, which is already considerable, expands further. There is, you know, renewed legislative activity, all of those kinds of things. So this is kind of what happens around the middle period of his life. And then I would say he has a difficult late life. Again, you know, a lot of the typical narratives of Suleyman don't necessarily talk about that, but first of all, he is, he gets very sick. He has gout. And, you know, as we know, gout basically, you know, members of aristocracies and upper classes throughout history basically get gout. He has a fairly severe case of the gout that immobilizes him at times for several weeks. For instance, in 1549, he's in campaign against the Safavids in the east. He has such severe gout attacks that, you know, he's completely immobilized for more than a month, and he starts shouting out of pain. And his chief officials, so that, you know, the soldiers won't hear the sultan scream, they have martial bands playing outside his tent to like, to kind of, you know, to make sure that, you know, if he screams, like he screams in agony basically. His health deteriorates throughout old age. Now, I don't know if, I don't know whether gout leads to that, but it looks like he also has some other circulation related problems and gastrointestinal problems, and these become worse and worse. And, I mean, this is a political environment in which, I mean, being a sultan is something very performative. I mean, just as being a politician today is performative, but I would say in the 16th century even more so. So in a kind of martial and macho patriarchal environment, being an old person with severe, you know, health conditions basically is a very challenging thing. So we see the emergence of rumors about him being replaced by one of his sons, you know, so he has a very challenging old age. He has one of his sons executed on the suspicion of rebellion. A couple of years after that, another one of his sons rebels. This time, I mean, you know, it's not an allegation anymore. One of his sons openly rebels against him and against another son. He's not successful. He escapes into Iran, where he's imprisoned and he's eventually executed in Iran. So basically, you know, in his old age, he lives something close to a Shakespearean tragedy, basically. He's very keen on family life. I can see that. I mean, it's, you know, sometimes when you write these kinds of biographies, you get the feeling that, you know, there are certain things that jump at you. I don't want to speculate, but in the case of Suleiman, unlike in the case of his father, there is a part of him that really wants a kind of family happiness, a kind of closeness, a kind of intimacy. He's able to create that, but then, you know, in his old age, he also sees that kind of a sort of, you know, family structure or family happiness implode under the strain of political tensions. So he gets sicker and sicker. He has two of his sons executed. His remaining son, I mean, he has another heir for the throne, but it's fairly obvious that, you know, in terms of dynamism, initiative, skills, the remaining son is not the best candidate for the throne. He has another son who has a congenital defect. He also dies in 1555 out of natural causes. That's something that he finds very painful. It's very obvious. So he basically spends the last decade and a half of his life basically dealing with these kinds of tensions, and then in 1566, he decides to go on one more campaign. Also, his beloved wife, Huram, dies in 1558. So he gets lonelier and lonelier. You kind of start seeing it. I'm not trying to humanize him that much because this is a person, you know, who decided over the fate of tens of thousands of people during his reign, but at the same time, you know, you get to see these sorts of personal dimensions. So his wife dies in 1558. He's lonelier and lonelier, and then in 1566, basically, he decides to go on one more campaign as if, you know, to prove himself, to remember, you know, the glory of his youth and stuff like that. It's not a very major campaign. You know, he could have easily sent one of his frontier commanders or one of his ministers, but no, he insists on, you know, leading the army himself, and again, he keeps having health problems during the journey. He gets so sick that he's unable to ride on his horse, so they have a cart for him, you know, which, again, is a kind of a loss of face because, you know, being on your horse, you know, appearing to your soldiers and stuff like that, these are important things. And he dies in early September 1566 while besieging a Hungarian fortress that's of minor importance, I would say. So that's where he ends his life. Wow. That's a busy life full of lots of ups and lots of downs, I would say. Yeah. So would you say that you wrote the book so that you could sort of go into detail of the parts of his life that haven't really been shown, or was there another reason why you decided to write this biography? Yeah, that's an interesting story. I was sitting in my office, I think, in 2016 or so, and the phone rang. We don't even have those stationary phones anymore. But, you know, the phone rang and I picked it up and there was another person on the other side of the line saying, hey, I read your first book, I liked it, would you consider writing a biography of Suleiman? You know, I thought it was a prank. I have those kinds of friends, you know. But, you know, the other person introduced themselves and I googled their name and, yeah, I mean, it's a bona fide person. It's a real person that exists. And then, you know, I said a biography of Suleiman, but, I mean, there are a couple of things. First of all, as historians, you know, I mean, we have a knee-jerk reaction against the biography of a great man. I mean, you know, this is not something that we do anymore. This is almost, you know, entirely the realm of popular history and, frankly, not politically very palatable either in this time and age. I said that and I also asked, you know, would anybody be interested in reading a biography of Suleiman? Thankfully, the person who contacted me, Bonnie Smith, she recently retired from Rutgers. She is a specialist on the history of early modern women. So, Bonnie is not someone whose feminist credentials could be questioned. So, she told me, you know, look, I mean, I'm not asking you, obviously, to write, you know, a story of, like, you know, fire and glory and, you know, battlefields and stuff like that. But she said, yes, I mean, it would be useful to revisit, you know, the life of someone like Suleiman. And she also talked about a research that I believe either Oxford University Press or someone else had done. They went to U.S. college campuses and they asked students, you know, give me 10 names whose biography you would like to read. And Suleiman's was apparently one of those. There were other obvious picks, I think, you know, Henry VIII and stuff like that. But, you know. So, I was positively surprised. So, I started writing it. But, you know, this was supposed to be a much shorter, minimum notes geared for an undergraduate audience type of project. I finished it. I submitted it to the publisher. But then the series in which the book was going to appear folded. So, that was a time when I really didn't know, you know, that, you know, what I would see the light of day. But, you know, it was a nice exercise. I spent a couple of summers working on that, you know, collecting my thoughts on the subject. But then, someone else from Oxford University Press contacted me, you know, Susan Ferber, the chief editor who also handles the history collections. And she said, you know, I really like this project. But, you know, this is worth more attention. So, let's turn this into a regular book, into, you know, an academically researched sort of biography of Suleiman that will also have the potential of appealing, you know, to people who are not academics. And then I accepted. I kind of had a draft in my hands. But I think the book is three times larger than, you know, the first one that I had written for undergraduate audiences. So, this is kind of the story behind it. Why did I write it? I mean, number one, I spent a good part of my life, you know, studying the 15th and 16th centuries, you know, roughly the time during which Suleiman lived. I kind of followed in the footpaths of my academic advisor, Cornel Fleischer at the University of Chicago. And I studied, and I continue to study, the 16th century as a major turning point in human history. Kind of, you know, the beginning of a kind of modernity, not necessarily or obviously the, you know, Western Europe-dominated capitalist modernity, but a kind of different modernity, or an early modernity in which non-Western actors and entities like the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals in India, the Ming and then the Qing dynasties in China basically played crucial roles in the history of the world. This is, as far as I see it, the first veritable age of globalization in the sense that, you know, we are able to talk about a globalization in the circulation of goods, but also in the circulation of ideas and in these kinds of, you know, sophisticated and complicated exchanges among different polities. So, as such, I thought using Suleiman as a kind of, you know, window through which I could get people to look into that, you know, complicated history of the 16th century might be a good idea. So, you know, from sort of an academic perspective, that's, I would say, the reason why, you know, I said yes to these two different invitations and I ended up writing this biography. Not to write a biography, but to use the biographical perspective in order to tell a story about a wider period, something like that. Fabulous. That's incredible. So maybe just one more question before we close up. Whilst you were working on the book and doing your research, you know, moving from one draft to the second, was there something in particular that struck you as incredibly fascinating or interesting or surprising that you weren't expecting to read or learn about as you were researching? There are a number of things. First of all, in terms of the sources, I was once more amazed by sort of the plurality of perspectives that you find in Ottoman, Sefavid, and European historical and diplomatic sources of the period. These are really worth revisiting. This is a time in which both in Europe as well as in the Middle East and in other parts of the world, I mean, one of the, I think, consequences or, you know, reflections of this new kind of globalization, but also a new kind of a new age of empire building is the explosion in the written word. People coming from different social backgrounds, people with different political agendas have written narratives about the time in which they lived. So I knew that, but I realized as a historian, you kind of internalize the sources that you work on. So while looking at them from the outside with kind of a fresh eye, I was once again struck by, again, how many different kinds of voices and approaches we can get from the sources of the period. And as I was telling you a little while ago, I was also particularly fascinated by these European diplomats' reports, the collections of their service in Constantinople, and how the dialogue about the political situation in Europe within the Ottoman Empire or these sorts of ideological debates, how that dialogue was very, very, very lively and very detailed. That was also very fascinating. Two more things, chance and contingency. I mean, you know, again, obviously these are things that everybody is aware of, but still, I mean, even in a well-established empire, even within the well-regulated life of an imperial figure, I mean, chance and contingency play such important roles, and they make everything so unpredictable. I mean, there are twists in the life story of Sulayman that, you know, if I had read them in fiction, I would have found it hard to believe. And yet, here they are. His survival, his father's survival, for instance, during those succession struggles is nothing short of miraculous. Obviously, it is not a miracle, it is a matter of chance. So, that was the other important thing. Also, I mean, writing a biography, interestingly enough, makes you think about yourself, and there is a French writer that I like very much. Her name is Marguerite Ursonar. She wrote a well-respected book, but very few people would remember it. I'm sure if I asked my students, nobody would have heard of it. She wrote something called, she wrote a number of mostly historical novels. One of them is called The Memoirs of Hadrian, the Roman emperor. And Marguerite Ursonar also wrote a wonderful sort of introduction or postscript to it, in which she says that she had conceived of the idea of writing a biography of Hadrian when she was 18, but she had to wait for a certain age. Something very similar happened to me. Again, as a middle-aged person, I think my younger self wouldn't have been able to understand certain things about Suleyman's life, especially his late-life struggles, leaving behind a legacy, his frustration, and all of this sort of stuff. So, I guess, you know, in order to write certain things, people may have to wait for a certain age, except the geniuses among us. Well, that's incredible to hear. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure talking to you about your new book. If anyone is wanting to buy the book, you can find the book down below from Oxford University Press. I'll make sure to leave the link there for them. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Kelly, likewise. I really appreciate your patience. As historians do, I have a tendency to ramble, so thank you for your patience. It's been great. Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. This video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia. For more great articles and interactive content, head to our website via the link below. If you like my sweater, you can find this design and a bunch more in our shop at worldhistory.store, or you can find a link for it down below. Thank you so much for watching, and we will see you soon with another video.