The World полностью

His favourite, Ibrahim Pasha, commissioned Venetian jewellers to craft a four-crowned imperial tiara. The vizier ruled supreme, based in a new palace on the hippodrome (still standing) where he presided over spectacular shows of imperial power. Grand viziers had the right to display five horsetails on their banners, but Ibrahim was allowed six, just one fewer than the sultan. Only Ukrainian Hürrem, nicknamed Roxelana – mother of five sultanic children – had the power to challenge him.

The sultan’s teenaged son, Mustafa, was jealous of Ibrahim. The system played teams of mother and son against mother and son. Unable to undermine Hürrem, Mustafa’s mother, Mahidevran, attacked her, scratching her face and tearing her hair. Summoned by Suleiman, Hürrem refused to come, saying her looks had been destroyed. Mahidevran was exiled.

Suleiman’s life seemed stable with Ibrahim and Roxelana. While his mother Hafsa ruled his family world, Suleiman did not change Roxelana’s status. But when the valide sultan died, he first manumitted Roxelana, still in her twenties, then married her.^*

After several sons, only one of whom could succeed, Suleiman and Hürrem stopped having children, aware that losers in the power tournament would be strangled. Hürrem probably used intravaginal suppositories, with oil from cabbage leaves, pepper, juice of peppermint, leaves of pennyroyal and dill. She inherited control of the Old Palace and the harem, emerging out of the shadows, corresponding with the queens of Poland and Hungary while endowing her own charitable foundations in Istanbul and Jerusalem. ‘You know I’m never content with the least thing,’ she admitted to Suleiman.

Suleiman and Ibrahim were planning wars, treaties and construction on a vast scale. In the east, Suleiman fought the Shiite Persians; in the west, in 1524, he defeated the Hungarians and killed young King Ludwig of Hungary, triggering one of the Habsburg marriage deals made by Emperor Maximilian: Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, was married to Ludwig’s sister. So Ferdinand now claimed Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia, which would remain Habsburg kingdoms until 1918. Then in 1529 Suleiman and Ibrahim invaded Austria, 120,000 Ottomans besieging Vienna, which was saved only by the heavy rains that forced them to leave behind their heavy guns. Three years later, they attacked again; this time Charles counter-attacked into Ottoman Hungary.

Charles and Suleiman did not just conduct their duel on land. In 1528, facing Ottoman advances on land and slave-hunting Islamic pirates by sea, Charles hired the best Christian admiral, Andrea Doria, ruler of Genoa as Perpetual Censor, heir to a dynasty of seafaring oligarchs. When Suleiman was distracted by war against Iran, Doria raided Ottoman Greece. Suleiman in turn summoned the greatest corsair of his time: Barbarossa.

* Charles fielded an army of Swiss and German Landsknechte and Spanish tercios, experts in the use of pike and arquebus. Their pike squares allowed them to reload and fire in unison. François also employed Landsknechte but fewer of them. Arquebuses were constantly improved, with Italy as the laboratory of technical innovation. Imperial troops started to use heavier arquebuses, supported on a rest, that penetrated armour: they became known as moschetti – muskets – and they quickly made armour obsolete, ending the era of heavily armoured knights that had started with cataphracts in Persia a millennium earlier. The most famous gunmaker was naturally an Italian. Da Vinci experimented with musket designs. In 1526, an Italian artisan, Bartolomeo Beretta, founded a foundry in northern Italy that manufactured muskets. In the 1530s, Beretta was experimenting with a new, smaller firearm: pistols – from the Czech pistole – became an aristocratic fashion item, bespoke and intricately ornamented. As for the Beretta, the factory is still producing guns today.