In Europe anti-Muslim sentiment simmered.
By 1095 it reached the boiling point.
Pope Urban II spent most of that year travelling through France,
imploring his feudal lords to unite in a campaign of bloodshed.
'Hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your eastern brethren'
the Pope demanded.
'Jerusalem is the navel of the world.
'She cries out to be liberated.
'Christ himself commands it.'
So we've got a merging or a coming together
of military service and religion,
which served the purposes, if you like,
of a pope who in 1095 made his famous call to crusade
to rescue the endangered holy places in the East
and in particular Jerussalem.
In 1097, Muslim shepherds in Syria caught their first glimpse
of a sight that would soon strike terror throughout the Holy Land.
When the Crusaders struck, by sheer chance,
the Arab empire was at its most vulnerable,
broken into feuding kingdoms and petty dynasties.
They couldn't have chosen a better moment
because the Muslim world was in a very fragmented state.
The great rulers of the time had died
and into that power vacuum
there came this most unexpected enemy, the Crusaders from Western Europe.
Who would have thought that a new enemy
would come to the Islamic world from that unexpected quarter?
It was completely unprecedented. It was a real surprise.
The Muslims didn't really know who they were.
They thought they were just another lot of Byzantines
who were coming, as usual to be a nuisance
and fight on the borders.
They had no idea that there was this extraordinary surge
of religious fervour and fanaticism coming from Western Europe
and that the aim of this group was Jerusalem.
History is haunted by days of incomprehensible horror.
Few are darker than July 15th, 1099
when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem.
The massacre must have been terrible.
The fear...
the fleeing of the population...
It must have been horrendous.
From a letter to the Pope from the Crusaders...
"If you want to know what was done to the enemies we found in the city; know this,
"Our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."
They saw the Holy city and they were in a state of exultation.
And perhaps that's why,
when they flooded through the gates of the city,
that they were fired up with fanaticism and zeal.
And that's why there was this terrible massacre
in the name of Christendom.
It was a blot on the name of Christendom in the Muslim view
and justifiably so.
Even Christians weren't spared.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
dozens of worshippers from Eastern sects were massacred.
To the Crusaders, they were nothing more than foreigners.
The Christian chronicles record the carnage.
'The Saracens who were still alive dragged the dead ones out
'and made huge piles of them.
Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of.
The pyres they made were like pyramids.
They shocked the Muslim world when they came.
There are a number of extremely moving lamentations in poetry
which date from that period.
And the Arab poets of the time
talk about the feelings of anguish and terror
which the Crusaders, or the Franks, as they're called in the Arab sources,
caused the local people... the old women, the young girls...
Those who are cloistered away in their houses are trembling with fear.
The whole imagery is that of...
the rape of their land
and the... terrible impurities
caused by these barbarian infidels coming into their sacred space.
'We have mingled blood with flowing tears
'and there is no room left in us for pity.
'To shed tears is man's worst weapon
'when the swords stir up the embers of war,
"when blood has been split,
"when sweet girls must hide their lovely faces in their hands for shame."
The First Crusade was over.
Of the 100,000 men who began the campaign
most would eventually return to Europe, having had only a glimpse of Muslim life.
The job of occupying Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside
fell to the 20,000 who remained... indefinitely.
To secure their occupation
the intruders did here what they had done in Europe
They built castles.
The Crusaders built the finest castles that the Near East has ever seen.
And the proof of that is that they're still there.
When everything else may have faded away,
the Crusaders castles remain a living testimony to their presence
and Crac des Chevaliers in Syria
is THE Crusader castle of them all.
It's very, very big. It's strong. It's impenetrable.
It's a living example of the way
that a number of the Crusader castles couldn't be taken by siege.
You can see for miles and miles from it
and see the other castles that would have been in visual distance
for communication by fire and smoke signals.
It's got all the accoutrements of a good medieval castle
with battlements and turrets
and places for pouring boiling oil and other liquids down onto the enemy.
But inside that castle, what was life really like?
It wasn't merriment and festivity.
It was constant fear.
You had to be on the lookout in case someone was trying to mine the castle
or to climb over the walls with scaling ladders.
The people outside, the population, the local peasantry...
they were not friendly.
So you had to watch their movements all the time.
It was a terrifying place.
The Crusaders made treaties... and broke them.
They harassed the traders who passed by their castles.
As they raided caravans,
the Crusaders learned of a luxurious lifestyle unheard of in Europe.
Materially, the Crusaders were just blown away
by what they found in the Middle East.
And they took a lot back with them.
Inlaid metalwork, textiles, silks...
things just never seen in such quantities before... the good life.
These things they brought back to Europe, some as souvenirs.
In fact, a whole industry developed in the Middle East.
Of providing souvenirs for the Crusaders to take back.
It is perhaps a Western bias
to imagine the Crusaders were a decisive force in world events,
devastating to the Islamic culture and trade.
The truth is,
while the Knights of the Crusades were bunkeringndown in their castles,
Islam was spreading its influence and flourishing.
Muhammad's message rang out as clear and strong as it ever had.
Allahu akbar!
Mosques were now on every horizon.
They welcomed traders.
They housed schools and hospitals.
Through Islamic architecture, literature and music
a vibrant culture was emerging in celebration of a singular faith.
Faith had launched an empire.
Culture was now enlightening it.
But ultimately what united it was trade.
For the Muslims, trade, like science, brought innovation.
Business was expedited by a revolutionary concept called the sakk,
a cheque that could be written in Spain
and cashed in India.
Writing a cheque assumes that someone will cash it at the other end.
And that if you have money in one place
someone will say "I have access to that somewhere else."
So this imply that you have some kind of central bank
or central loan organisation who's going to be good for the money.
So it frees up your ability to travel.
It frees up commerce because the money doesn't have to be moved
from Samarkand back to Cordoba, and back the other way the next year.
So you can base it all on trust and faith.
And Muslims became some of the greatest merchants of the Middle Ages.
And the greatest craftsmen as well.
From the Persians, Muslim blacksmiths learned how to fold steel
to give it strength and flexibility.
The swords made in Toledo and Damascus had no equal in the world.
But the economic backbone of Islam's expanding wealth was textiles.
The demand for the products of Muslim looms was enormous...
for cashmere, cotton and silk.
Textiles were simply the gas and steel industry of medieval times.
Because you have to think of textiles not only as growing the plants
but making all the dyes.
The dyes were particularly expensive and imported the farthest.
Then you need all the fixtures and mordants and equipment for looms,
then you need to transport these textiles.
So, collectively, the industry of making and transporting textiles
was the mainstay of the economy.
While Europeans settled for coarse woollen and linen garments,
Muslims wore brocaded fabrics of organdie, damask and taffeta,
words that came into the English language from Arabic and Persian.
The fabrics produced in the Islamic world were among the finest ever produced.
And they were made of not only plain linen or cotton
but also very, very fancy silks,
cloth of gold, where silk thread is wrapped with gold,
and with very, very complicated patterns.
These complex patterns were coveted by wealthy Europeans
and the Church as well.
When the Christians needed a cloth
worthy of wrapping the bones of their saints,
the choice was obvious.
They looked to a Muslim loom.
But sometimes the fabrics were trimmed
with decorative Arabic text from the Holy Qur'an.
And so the words of the Prophet sometimes appeared
in shocking proximity to Christendom's holiest icons.
It is not unusual to find in Italian Renaissance paintings, for example,
to find paintings of the Virgin
wearing a robe of very fancy patterned cloth
and precious silks embroidered with gold
or woven with gold designs.
Sometimes they would say things with an Arabic inscription on it
which says " There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet", in Arabic.
After almost 100 years of broken treaties and sporadic fighting,
The Muslims reached a tuning point in their struggles against the Crusaders.
It came in the person of one of Islam's most celebrated figures.
His name was Salah ad-Din.
But the West would remember him, and come to revere him, as Saladin.
There is certainly one thing we must recognise about Saladin
and that is that he was successful
where many others of his faith and his part of the world had not been.
He possessed one unusual feature.
In addition to his intelligence and his robust physical strength,
he certainly seems to have been a great inspirer of his military followers.
In 1187, Saladin amassed an army of 12,000 mounted warriors
and lured the Crusaders out of Jerusalem
onto a plain between two hills called the Horns of Hattin.
On the evening of July 3rd, after a long march,
the Crusaders camped on a barren hillside.
There was nothing but a waterless terrain.
And we're talking about July.
We're talking about the Middle East, about incredible heat and no water.
As dawn approached, Saladin's men set fire to the tall grass
and a strong wind carried the flames into the Christian encampment.
And very soon they found themselves surrounded, as in the Muslim tactic,
by their enemy,
and panic set in.
"The flames bore down on them and the heat became intense"
Saladin's secretary wrote.
"The people of the Trinity were consumed by the fire of flames,
"the fire of thirst and the fire of arrows."
The army of the Crusaders was totally decimated.
And the victory at Hattin
was a real turning point for Saladin.
It meant that he could then proceed
to take Jerusalem later on that year.
Three months later, Saladin entered Jerusalem.
For the first time in almost a century,
the call to prayer floated over the Holy City once again.
And yet, remarkably,
Saladin levelled no retaliation against Christians or their holy places.
In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre., mass was celebrated as usual.
Saladin also decreed that Christians who wished to
could leaye the city with their property.
Those who chose to stay would be allowed to worship freely.
When his reputation reached Western Europe
of the way he had behaved in Jerusalem over the conquest,
he gradually became the most famous Muslim of all time.
Saladin's victory did not put an end to Western aspirations in the Near East.
Other crusades would follow, though, as with the first,
they would hardly have an impact on the larger Islamic culture.
The Crusaders would eventually be driven from their citadels along the coast
and return to Europe,
their only lasting legacy a few abandoned castles.
But the returning Crusaders found themselves changed
by their contact with Islamic culture.
The long term impact on European life would be profound.
They were just amazed by the material culture they found there.
The quality of the merchandise
was far better than anything at home and they brought it home with them.
They came back, for example, with a taste for highly spiced food.
They imported pepper and cinnamon and other oriental spices
because their tastebuds had been whetted by a different cuisine.
We know that they found out the delights of using soap
when they were in the Middle East
and it would appear that that caught on back in Europe.
After the Crusades,
many Europeans were far more open
to the ideas of what was going on to the East
and in other parts of the world.
They simply couldn't be as insular as before.
Lots of people were open to "What's out there? Let's explore this."
New intellectual thoughts... "Let's see what these people are writing."
This is when people start to learn Arabic, slowly, in the West.
As the barrier of the language dissolved,
ideas born in the great Muslim cities began to filter into Europe.,
ideas that would forever change Western thought.
The great Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas
used the writings of the Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rüsd)
To justify the clear separation of faith and reason,
a Muslim ideal that formed the basis of all scientific inquiry
and led to the European Renaissance.
Averroes (Ibn Rüsd) himself appears in Raphael's classic Renaissance painting
of great Western thinkers.
Here, alongside Plato and Aristotle,
stands a vivid reminder of the debt the world owes Islam.
The scope of Islamic civilisation
has now reached levels
which certainly were not accomplished
by any other known civilisation of the world.
It actually unified parts of our globe
in ways that had not been witnessed before.
But this golden age of Islam was not to last.
After shrugging off the Crusades
and bringing the precious gift of knowledge to Europe,
the great cities of the Islamic empire would be brought to ruin
by a force more terrible than anything the Europeans could muster.
Their libraries destroyed the wealth plundered,
the empty cities stood mute in the aftermath of a devastation
that desended upon them not from the West, but from the East...
It's known as the Mongol Catastrophe.
The Mongols were Turko-Mongolian nomads from the steppes of Central Asia.
In the 13th century, they rampaged across much of Eurasia
between the Ukraine and China.
It wasn't long before they entered Islamic Persia.
To the cultured, urban Muslims, these guys were a bunch of savages.
When you entered the Mongol army, you came with three horses
and you lived off the horses.
First you drank their blood, then when you'd moved far enough away
you killed them, you slaughtered them and ate their meat.
And that's why they could go so far and survive so long.
Terror was the Mongols' principal tactic.
One of the local Iranian leaders foolishly decides
to kill off the emissary that the Mongols have sent.
In doing that, he evokes the anger of the Mongols,
who want to use him as an example.
They use this retaliatory technique often, of killing off entire towns,
wiping them out as examples.
So they build these fantastic towers of skulls,
piling up all the dead bodies as an example.
And then all the other towns around immediately give way.
City after city fell before them.
It was only a matter of time before they reached the centre of Islamic power.
On February the 10th, 1258
the Mongols took Baghdad.
According to the Arab chroniclers,
the Mongols put Baghdad to the torch and killed 10,000 inhabitants.
Mosques and libraries, the collected knowledge of centuries,
were all set ablaze.
Within less than 50 years,
the Mongols seized the heart of the Islamic empire from the Arabs.
Islamic civilisation seemed poised for destruction...
Iost to posterity.
But then something remarkable happened
While the consensus of opinion
is that Mongols were a devastating force,
I personally feel that they also had a very positive effect
on Western Asia and the world of Islam.
They opened the world tremendously.
Historically, the most significant thing about the Mongols for us
would be that they became Muslims.
Most in the end... converted to Islam
and then became, after being these tremendously destructive forces
some of the greatest patrons of the arts and letters in all of Islamic history.
The conversion, and its lasting effect, was extraordinary.
Within a decade, the Mongols had gone from building towers of human heads
to building mosques glorifying God.
It is not surprising to me that the land conquered the conquerors.
The Mongols themselves became Muslims, or Islamic leaders, par excellence.
The Mongols transformed Islam.
Now, Islamic power could be held by anyone,
not just the Arabs who had created it.
The Mongols threw open the door for the great gunpowder empire to follow...
The empire of the OTTOMAN TURKS.
Islam was now set on a new course of expansion
to both the east and the west...
marching to, the beat of Turkish drums.
The Ottoman Turks began as a nomadic people
from the steppe beyond the Aral Sea.
For centuries they had wandered present day Turkey,
looking fof new pasture lands.
Muslim Sultans had enlisted them as mercenaries
to fight off the Mongol Hordes
But in the upheaval following the Mongol invasion,
the Turks began to stake out their own territorial claims.
From their ranks emerged a warlord of legendary ambition.
His name was Osman Bey.
It's said that Osman had a miraculous dream
of a magical tree whose many branches foretold his siring a powerful lineage.
One wonders how much of it is truth, how much of it is legend...
It makes a lovely story.
And miracles are almost more easy to digest than reality
I don't think he realised that he was setting up such a fantastic dynasty
a dynasty that was to rule the crucial link between three continents.
The followers of Osman became known as Ottomans.
They considered themselves warriors for the faith, or Ghazis.
Whose destiny was to bring Islam to the world...
Ghazis were somewhat like freelancers
who moved the empire forward
either for ideology, theology, or for the sake of pure conquest.
They were probably very brave,
never thought about themselves or any harm that could come to the group
by going into dangerous conditions.
But it made the Ottoman Empire almost fearless
going into regions that nobody had been there before.
For the early Ottomans,
the direction of expansion would always be to the west. For good reason
They could not expand to the east or to the south
because those were controlled by their brothers
the Turkoman emirs, the Muslims.
And a Muslim should not be fighting against a Muslim,
so they said at the time.
So the only place you could expand
was towards the Christian territories, westward.
Osman's warriors moved to the north and west across the Anatolian pleateu
into, territory controlled by the traditional Christian power in the area,
the ageing Byzantine Empire.
By Osman's time,
the 1000-year-old Byzantine Empire was reaching the end of its age,
dwindling to an isolated stronghold in Eurasia.
The Crusaders had already wreaked havoc across the region
on their way to Jerusalem,
sacking the capital city
and helping to reduce the once proud Byzantine Empire
to a few small warring states.
The Ottomans quickly overrun the splintered the Byzantine factions.
Uniting north-westem Anatolia into, a single domain.
In 1326, the Ottomans took the powerful Byzantine city of Bursa...
a victory that would change the character of the Ottoman Turks forever.
The most important part of Bursa
was that it enabled Osman and his descendants
to establish a seat of the government.
The restless nomads of the steppe would settle down to build an empire.
What we are witnessing is this huge demographic event.
The movement of a whole civilisation
from a nomadic way of life to a settled way of life.
Now, when the Ottomans took Bursa and set it up as their capital,
they were very concerned to establish themselves
as the rightful standard bearers
of Muslim civilisation.
Civilisation meant organisation
and the Ottomans set out to manage the vast regions they now controlled.
Leaving the Byzantine clerks in place, they began to organise the new empire.
First and foremost, taxation and record keeping.
The word 'bureaucracy' has since lost its noble connotations.
Yet this was a great innovation, an ambitious as any triumph in battle.
The Ottomans are known for including
and synthesising the cultural elements through the lands that they passed.
They are known for creating structures
by which the people who lived there before.
Could carry on their lives and beliefs in the way that they chose.
In fact the Ottomans had fever conflicts with their Christian subjects
than those of their own faith...
Muslim adversaries intent on challenging Ottoman rule.
One of the bureaucratic, or let us say, management problems facing the Ottomans
was that there were still...
rival Muslim, sort of proto kingdoms around them.
They were conquered by the Ottomans but they had old grudges to bear.
And they had certain claims to dynastic glory of their own.
And they were constatly worried about these old Muslim families
rising up and creating a rebellion.
And so the story goes that they felt it would be imprudent
to have the army made up of these sorts of people.
And so they wanted to recruit children
who were not connected with any rival Muslim family.
And so they went into the Balkans
and they recruited primarily Christian children.
This practise was called 'devshirme'.
The young boys were technically slaves of the Sultan
But they weren't treated like slaves
First, they were borught into the Muslim faith
told rituals of washing and praying
and the Arabic and Ottoman languages.
This serve the political as well as a religious purpose
Through the 'devshirme' system,
The Ottomans could create a cast without any conflicting loyalties to tribe or family.
These children had such great future. That a lot of the times
Turks or even Muslims pretended that their children were Christian borned
and would registered them to the 'Devshirme' officials...
These children were then given the best possible education
available in the world, perhaps, at the time.
And they were than able
to move into the highest positions of power in the empire.
Those who were brainy went to the palace schools
and graduated into different levels of viziers and governors.
They even became Grand Viziers.
Those who were brawny went to the Janissary corps.
The Janissaries were the Sultan's elite infantry.
It was an army that would set the standard for centuries to come.
They were the strongest, trained as military machines,
no fear of dying, totally fearless.
And their only love was to serve the Sultan.
For the first time an army wore uniforms
and went into battle to the accompliment of military band.
The Janissaries were the most fear troops in the western world
A force that was were to this new Islamic empire,
and its restless visions of conquest...
By the middle of the 15th century
the Ottoman Empire spread from present-day Turkey, known as Anatolia,
deep into the Balkans.
With one critical exception.
It must have galled the Ottoman sultan
that with his domains now stretching all the way into Asia
and far, far into Europe in the West,
there remained, right in the centre of his domains, the greatest prize of all,
the capital city of Constantinople,
the most powerful, the richest, most magnetic city in the entire world,
still in the hands of the dying but not yet dead Byzantine Empire.
To the Ottomans,
Constantinople's strategic and economic importance was considerable.
Its symbolic significance was even greater.
It was The City. There was no other city.
If you were going to rule that area, obviously you'd rule it from that city.
It's said that the goal of laying claim to Constantinople
was decreed by Muhammad himself.
Every Ottoman ruler since Osman had wanted to, seize the city
but it had always remained firmly in Christian hands.
Than a Sultan came to power
whose dreams of conquest would not be denied.
History would honour him as Mehmet the Conqueror.
When he assumed the sultanate, he was only 12 years old
but he was already well versed in Ottoman politics.
To remove any threat of competition for power,
he had his half-brother strangled.
The empire always meant everything, more so than the family.
In order to stop the empire from splitting,
as had happened to other Turkish dynasties, ruling the Islamic world,
when a young man became sultan upon the death of his father,
all the other brothers had to be eliminated.
This prevented segmentation of the empire.
It may have been cruel, but it worked for the Ottomans.
By the middle of the 15th century, the city was a shadow of its former self.
The population had plummeted from 400,000 to a mere 50,000.
But a besieging army would still be at a tremendous disadvantage.
Constantinople was surrounded on three sides by water,
and massively fortified.
It was encircled by a triple ring of walls neady 100 feet high and 30 feet thick.
And they had already stood for a thousand years.
But Mehmet had an answer for these walls.
Part of the military superiority of the Ottomans
came from their sophisticated and diverse use of the possibilities of gunpowder.
The siege of Constantinople in 1453 under Mehmet the Conqueror
saw the first dramatic application of this
in the form of huge cannons that had not been seen before
and which Mehmet had specially commissioned for the occasion.
Earlier cannons had been assembled with strips of forged metal bound with hoops.
The fired stone projectiles with little more power than a catapult.
A new breed of cannons could be cast of solid bronze
and packed with enough gunpowder
to propel metal cannonballs with staggering force.
But Mehmet was not staking his hopes on cannon alone.
The mile wide channel of the Bosphorus Strait
was all that connected the city to the Black Sea.
If he could cut it off, Constantinople would be at his mercy.
Mehmet needed to construct a strategically positioned fortress
to close the strait.
He built it, right in the shadow of the great city walls.
It took less than four months.
To build a massive seven towered citadel called Rumeli Hisar.
Mehmet himself is said to have carried stones during its construction.
No sooner was it completed
than he tightened his noose round the neck of the Bosphorus.
The first ship to defy his orders to stop was sunk,
its crew decapitated and its captain impaled on the castle walls.
To stop Mehmet's ships from approaching,
the Byzantines strung a massive chain across the strait.
On April 22nd, 1453 the besieged city watched in horror.
As Mehmet's troops hoisted 70 of his ships ashore,
sliding them over land on greased planks, passed the barrier chain.
More than 100,000 Ottoman soldiers
now stood before the walls of Constantinople.
Braced for the greatest bombardment the history of warfare had ever known.
Under relentless fire,
the city's 7000 Christian defenders held out for nearly a month.
In desperation, the Byzantines who occupied the city
appealed to, their fellow Christians across the continent for help.
But of course, 15th-century Europe was completely incapable
of mounting any kind of concerted opposition to the rising Turkish threat in the east.
At that time, the kings of Europe
had military and political problems of their own.
Constantinople would have to, fend for itself.
Shortly before dawn on 29th, 1453
the Turkish army breached the walls of the city.
Within hours, Constantinople was in the hands of the Ottomans.
Mehmet rode into the city
and went straight to its most celebrated prize,
the magnificent church of Hagia Sophia.
Built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century,
its name meant the Church of Holy Wisdom.
It was the largest enclosed space in the world.
Surely other groups of Muslims and the Ottomans themselves
had come across many, many churches... they had seen churches before.
But they had never seen anything...
nobody had ever seen anything like Hagia Sophia.
The Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, as it's called in Turkish,
was one of the marvels of architecture, marvels of the world.
It had the largest and highest dome in history
and it was beautifully embellished with gold, mosaics...
and the space is incredible.
For Mehmet, it was a great booty.
Inside the church, a Turkish voice rose,
proclaiming in Arabic the First Pillar of Islam...
"There is no god but God. Muhammad is his messenger."
The single greatest church in Christendom was now a mosque.
The Hagia Sophia became the inspiration for all Ottoman domed mosques to come.
But none would evemmatch its size and scope.
And it belonged to Mehmet the Conqueror.
News of his triumph sent shock waves around the world.
For Europeans, it was a concomitant diaster.
Constantinople was, after all, the new Rome.
It was Constantine's capital city,
it was the symbol of Christian dominance in the East.
The Ottoman rulers had long stacked up titles for themselves...
Khan, which is Turkish for 'emperor'...
Shahinshah, Persian for 'king of kings'...
and Sultan, the Arabic word for 'ruler'.
But now, with all the former Byzantine Empire under their command,
Mehmet and his successors claimed yet another title...
Holy Roman Emperor.
The Ottomans had reached the gates of the West
and were poised to push on
towards what they now claimed as their ultimate destiny...
the conquest of Europe.
That quest would fall to the most legendary sultan of all.
He was born at the beginning of the 10th century by the Muslim calendar
and he was the tenth sultan descended from Osman.
He was a child of destiny, whose greatness was expected.
In the parlance of the day
he was the Sahip Karan, the 'universal ruler',
the master of an auspicious conjunction whose coming has been foretold
whose identity is confirmed astrologically.
His name was Süleyman, after Solomon,
the wise king of the Old Testament.
The Ottoman Empire would reach its apex under Süleyman's reign.
Süleyman was extremely well educated.
He was trained to the sultanate
from the day he was born.
As a young prince,
he formed a relationship that would have a tremendous impact on his life,
and on the empire as well.
When he was still a crown prince,
he also developed a great friendship with a convert,
a Greek convert who took the name lbrahim.
The two were very close in age
and apparently very close in other ways...
personally, intellectually,
educated together to a certain extent.
And, as was common practice,
when Süleyman acceded to the throne of the death of his father,
he took his faithful lbrahim with him to Istanbul.
Süleyman was 26 when he took the throne,
determined to make his mark on the world...
as soon as his ministers would let him.
The way to prove his mettle was on the battlefield.
Every new sultan was expected to begin his reign by expanding the empire.
Ottomans now controlled Kurdistan, Egypt
and the holiest cities of Islam,
Mecca and Medina.
Süleyman set his sights on Belgrade, in Hungary.
The stepping stone to Europe.
He was the head of the Ottoman dynasty
and he had certain duties to perform.
One was conquest.
And the first task Süleyman took upon himself,
a year after he ascended the Ottoman throne,
was to head towards Belgrade and capture it.
Belgrade was very important strategically
because it was from there the army could move further on west.
A year later, he turned his ambitions on the island of Rhodes.
The tiny island was a troublesome outpost of Christianity
in an otherwise Ottoman sea.
It was also a haven for pirates, preying on Muslim trade ships.
The 50,000 defenders of Rhodes manned one of the strongest forts in the world.
Süleyman decided on a tactic other than relying on gunfire from his huge cannons...
A new tactic, seldom used until that time.
The Ottomans are the first major force
to actually develop new ways of harnessing gunpowder
to the cause of military expansion in creative ways.
Ottoman sappers dug out a series of 50 tunnels near the base of the fort
so they could mine its foundations.
Performing this dangerous work
were expendable Christian conscripts from the Balkans.
The resulting explosion signalled a furious 6-hour Ottoman assault.
But the Turks were beaten back.
Then, after 145 days of siege,
The exhausted Christian defenders finally negotiated a truce.
The Ottomans had won.
Victory did more than deliver Rhodes to the empire.
Süleyman was now a sultan to be taken seriously.
His march of conquest had begun.
Europe grew to fear the name of Süleyman.
But within his own borders, he had another reputation.
Islamic history remembers him as Kanuni, the Law Giver.
Ottomans were really...
bureaucrats in the full sense of the word.
They kept every single record
and in order to control the different peoples
who participated in the world of the Ottomans,
they had to have very carefully sorted out legal systems.
Under Süleyman, a single legal system was defined for the sprawling empire.
His laws would later become the basis of constitutions for several other nations.
Süleyman was the supreme monarch of the area.
He was the centre of the world.
He inaugurated a classical age in Ottoman architecture,
commissioning some of the most spectacular buildings
the world has ever seen.
Süleyman was in a unique position of wealth
and of consolidation
and he focused his attention on developing monumental architecture
to commemorate his great dynasty and himself.
Great religious architecture
can really give people a sense of what is at the heart of the faith.
Grandeur and majesty are what come to mind
when Muslims think about God.
A building that is grand and majestic
can immediately remind people of the glory of God.
Süleyman's chief architect, Sinan
was a man whose vision perfectly complemeted the empire builder.
Sinan, perfected the signature structure of Islam...
the domed mosque.
His career spanned half a century and produced well over 300 buildings...
including the refurbishment of one of the most important monuments in Islam...
the Dome of the Rock in Jarussalem.
For the Sultan, of course he built his masterpiece,
the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istabul.
It is truly befitting Sinan who's called the great master...
These buildings were horrendously expensive,
huge things that took, many many years to build
and a great deal of architectural talent and engineering skill
and engineering experience.
When they built a mosque like the Süleymaniye,
they were doing it to say, "Yeah, I've got the power and money."
"I am the Sultan, I'm the King of kings.
But there was also tremendous spiritual value in these things.
The symbolism is not only that of empire, but of faith.
In the spirit of Muhammad's teaching,
the Great Mosque was a centre of social services,
complete with a hospital, school and library.
At its inauguration,
it's said Süleyman gazed at it with awe and exclaimed
"O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!"
No less impressive was Süleyman's palace.
Topkapi was the both the seat of government and his private dwelling.
Süleyman was also a great patron of the arts.
And since the empire was very rich, the best artisans were there.
So everything started flourishing.
The architecture or the arts of his period
show the first golden age of the Ottoman world.
Everything that came out of his palace was exquisite.
Süleyman himself was a goldsmith.
Ottomans believed that every sultan had to have a tangible trade.
Being a sultan was not considered
a practical or tangible trade.
And he was a very demanding patron,
insisted on checking the work, even commissioned a few things.
And I think each artisan group, or each corps, working for the palace
tried to outdo one another to please the Sultan
Because to please him had wonderful rewards.
The Ottomans, of course, exercised quite a lot of influence
on the European imagination
and the royal and political, if you will, ceremony and pomp of the Ottomans
was such that it would have humbled
any citizen of the known world then.
This was arguably one of THE greatest world empires
and European observers could not walk away
without feeling of respect for the sheer power of the Ottomans.
In public, Süleyman required that all those around him remained completely silent,
while he made his wishes known with the slightest nod or gesture.
It must have been a tremendously impressive sight
to see the courtyard of the palace
filled with some 6000 or 7000 Janissaries and other functionaries,
no one saying a word.
What was going on here was the creation of sovereignty.
So mysterious and yet so far reaching
as to be seen as nearly divine.
As Süleyman's power grew,
his life-long friend lbrahim rose in the court structure.
And Ibrahim Pasha who became a pasha later on,
became his devoted Grand Vizier.
In fact, lbrahim married his sister.
So they were not only good friends they were also related.
Ibrahim campaigned with his own army, growing in influence and ambition,
till his power was second only to Süleyman's.
But for power and ambition,
the secret world of the Sultan's harem had no equal.
Contrary to the Western stereotype, it was not the Sultan's playpen
but lay at the centre of dynastic power.
The harem was the private quarters of the Sultan.
We tend to think of the Harem as where the women live.
But what it means is the place where you're not on display.
Home is what it means
Islam allowed the Sultan four wives and many concubines.
It was a system designed to produce heirs... is what it was.
When you look into the actual details of how these things were carried out,
It was hardly anything terribly erotic.
I mean, the Sultan did not have much choice
in his selection of female companions.
The Sultan was not in a position to look around and say "I want her"
because his mother would have a lot to say about it.
With his first wife, Süleyman had a son and heir, Mustafa.
But while he was in his mid 30s,
the Sultan fell deeply in love with a Slavic slave girl named Hürrem.
In the West, we know her by a different name...
Roxelana.
Roxelana would bear him a rival heir
and become Süleyman's most trusted confidante.
The Sultan was supposed to be protected from any undue influences.
He was supposed to be protected from any rivals.
And in a way this creates a vacuum around his person
into which the harem life can enter.
And so the fact that he was so protected
works in a funny way to expose him to the influence
of his female companions, with whom he spend so much time.
And there were tremendously intelligent and ambitious women around him,
Roxelana being the most famous of all.
Süleyman is a complex character...
a man that we know from his own life was capable of the emotions
both toward his male friends and especially toward his...
the great love of his life, his wife Hürrem Sultan,
and toward his family as well.
He had a number of extremely talented sons on whom he lavished much affection.
Süleyman groomed his firstborn son Mustafa for power.
In the Ottoman tradition the young prince entered the military
and quickly won recognition as a talented general.
Mustafa was clearly the heir apparent.
For Süleyman, the future of his empire seemed limitless.
"I am GOD's SLAVE and SULTAN of this WORLD"
Süleyman would carve on a conquered fortress.
"I am Süleyman
"in whose name the Fridal sermon is read in Mecca and Medina.
"In Baghdad, I am the Shah.
"In the Byzantine realms, I am the Caesar
"and in Egypt, the Sultan."
He, of course, at the height of his powers,
clearly saw himself as dwarfing all his rivals.
Perhaps rightly so.
One of Süleyman's greatest rivals was to the east,
the empire of the Persian Safavids.
This was a Muslim enemy,
whose rival creed made them fierce antagonists of the Ottomans for centuries.
The Safavids were also Turkic in their ethnic origins
and indeed spoke Turkish as a language of daily life.
But they were moving into the Muslim world,
unlike the Ottomans who were moving into the West.
So, for the Ottoman Empire, they formed sort of the boundaries,
the easternmost boundaries of the Ottoman realm.
The Safavid dynasty were Shi'ite Muslims, bitter rivals to the Sunni Ottomans.
According to the Shi'ites,
a leader had to be designated by his predecessor
and had to be of the family of Muhammad.
According to the Sunni view, it was not designation that was necessary
and a person could be a leader of the community
without being a direct descendant of Muhammed.
This challenge to legitimacy is the basis of the Shi'ite-Sunni split,
a bitter division that still separates the Muslim world to this day.
And I would say
the Ottomans never really thought of themselves so much as Sunni
until the Safavids came forth as this rival Shi'i.
So, the Safavids developed a rival ideology to the Ottomans,
which then became an occasion for war
over, of course, what wars are usually fought over.
Wars are fought over land, wealth, territory, prestige...
And the Safavids waged a war of ideology in eastern Anatolia,
which was always for the Ottomans the most worrisome part.
The terrain is difficult to conquer, difficult to control.
The Safavid military was formidable
but they were cultural rivals to the Ottomans as well.
They were great patrons of the arts.
I think we know them more for their artistic patronage
than of their great conquests and laws and systems and administration.
And when you look at Isfahan, it is the most beautiful city in the world,
and that is the Safavid city, the Safavid capital.
But it doesn't give you the same sense of power
that the Ottoman Empire had or the Ottoman capital had.
It's a different sense of power.
It's more eloquent, perhaps,
more precious in its decoration and its ceremonial spaces.
It's a totally different aspect of Islam.
In the soaring palaces of the Safavid shahs,
murderous intrigues against Süleyman and his dynasty were hatched
that would reach into his very household.
But Süleyman's eyes were on the West,
where a fragmented and vulnerable Europe awaited his conquest.
The Ottoman Empire encompassed everything from Egypt to Kurdistan
and he now had Hungary as well.
But he had ambitions of going beyond that
and actually bringing the larger portions
of the world known to him,
if not all of it, under his control.
Süleyman's next step would be Vienna.
Its conquest would drive a dagger into the heart of the European Habsburg Empire
and open the way to the West.
But as the heavily armed Ottomans set out for Vienna,
the weather turned against them.
The heavy cannon that had swept the Ottomans to victory after victory
bogged down in the mud.
Süleyman had to move on without them.
With only light artillery, the Ottomans relentlessly shelled the city
But the smallest breach was ferociously defended.
After a lengthy siege, with winter fast approaching,
Süleyman withdrew his forces.
He was not concerned. He was sure he would return soon enough.
He never did.
Süleyman's failure to take Vienna was pivotal for Europe.
It was the first major defeat after a long time.
The Europeans had been losing and losing and losing
and this was the dawn of a new day for Europe.
But Süleyman had little to fair from Europe.
Rival Muslim Safavids, and his own family,
would bring the cruellest of sorrows to the Sultan.
And ultimately to his empire as well.
Süleyman in some ways serves as a sort of epitome
of the 16th-century idea of the wise and just ruler
who was at the same time a very tragic figure.
In the power laden world of the Sultan's household,
the intrigues never ceased.
The Topkapi Palace, as it was originally conceived,
had no quarters for the ladies.
The women lived in what was called the Old Palace.
But Hürrem always complained about her husband, as most wives would,
spending too many days and months campaigning outside the capital.
She kept saying she feels very lonely and the children miss him.
Well, surprisingly, there was a fire in the Old Palace,
fire in Hürrem's quarters.
So she had to be moved to the Topkapi Palace, temporarily,
while her old quarters were being renovated.
Well, she moved in and never moved out.
Now, Hürrem was at the centre of power,
promoting her own son as heir apparent
and immersing herself in a web of deadly gossip and suspicion.
She was incredibly devoted to her husband.
And any threat to Süleyman
was a threat to her and she had to get rid of it.
The first threat came from Ibrahim Pasha
who assumed titles that were only given to sultans.
So Hürrem knew something was going to happen eventually
and, to protect the empire and the dynasty,
lbrahim Pasha had to go.
On March 15th, 1536,
Süleyman and lbrahim Pasha dined together, as was their custom.
In the morning, Ibrahim's body was found, strangled.
But Süleyman's desolation and loss had only begun.
A few years after Ibrahim's death,
Hürrem claimed to have uncovered a plot to overthrow Süleyman,
devised, with Safavid help, by his beloved firstborn son and heir, Mustafa.
This is a continuous problem in Ottoman history,
sons trying to eventually replace their father.
This happens in monarchies.
Succession could become a problem, and it was an acute problem,
and Süleyman had his share of it.
And perhaps did not always play his hands right.
Without hesitation, Süleyman ordered Mustafa's execution...
than sat by the young man's body for days, refusing to allow anyone to touch him.
The best hope for the empire's future was dead.
When Hürrem herself died the following year,
Süleyman fell deeper into despair, finding solace in his poetry.
Most of the poetry, I think, was written after he lost his wife,
since he talks about the loneliness of being in office,
that he has nobody left any more and he's dying to join her.
"Even if your reign on the imperial throne seems everlasting,
"don't be taken in.
"One day, a hostile wind will blow
and bring to your land of beauty heaven's misfortune and deepest suffering."
In all his loneliness, there was only one refuge for the Sultan
whose power, like his sorrow seemed limitless.
He returned to the field of battle, to the work of conquest.
He personally led thirteen campaigns.
The last one was at Zigetvar, which is in Hungary now.
I think he knew that this was going to be his last campaign.
He personally led it,
knowing that he would not come back alive.
In 1561, the man who had ruled the empire longer than any other
died in his grand war pavilion surrounded by his generals.
He was 67.
No Ottoman sultan would ever achieve his greatness again.
The nexus of world power would move from the Mediterranean Sea
to the Atlantic Ocean and the New World,
slowly leaving the Ottomans behind.
In Istanbul today, the Sufi dervishes still turn
with the same prayerful pirouettes they danced in Süleyman's day.
It is a meditation in motion,
whose mystic origins go back even further,
to the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
"You have become the best community ever raised up in mankind"
the Qur'an assures all believers,
"enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong
"and having faith in God."
Islamic and Western civilisation have the same roots.
Their dawning in the Fertile Crescent.
The monotheism of the Jews and the Christians.
The classical intellectual culture of the Ancient Greeks.
The two traditions are kindred spirits,
alike, yet very different.
Islam's legacy is intertwined with the West's.
And to the billions of Muslims who make it the second largest religion in the world,
it is a living legacy.
An elemental part of the great human venture
that is world civilisation.