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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for the

Spectator and my guest this week is the historian Christopher de Belague, whose new book is The Lion House, The Coming of a King.

And the king in question is Suleiman the Magnificent.

We're right back in the early 16th century.

Christopher, really dumb and obvious question,

but what was so magnificent about Suleiman?

Well, he only got called magnificent much later on, but he was fairly magnificent at the time.

He inherited an empire that had been expanded hugely, enormously, by his father, Selim

the Grim. In just eight years, he'd basically almost tripled the size of the empire and just about doubled the number

of its subjects.

So Solomon came at a propitious time and he survived on the throne from 1520 to 1566, which makes him a very long ruler by any measure, but particularly

by the measures of the time. And he expanded that territory even further. He struck terror into

Christian Europe and he expanded eastwards, because the thing about any Turkish Empire and the Ottoman Empire is no different is that you have to be, you have to have eyes in the back of your head.

So you have to look east as well as west.

And so he was essentially, he spent the first sort of 20 odd years of his reign campaigning on both fronts.

In the course of these campaigns, he amassed enormous lucre, and he spent the

lucre, certainly at the beginning of his reign, on a lot of bling and very high-quality bling. So there was a lot of

enormously sort of show-offy events and ceremonials that took place and which he used to show off to, in particular to his

main rival, who was Charles V, the Hatsburg, Holy Roman Emperor. So by that measure, he was fairly

magnificent. His revenues were almost uncountable. They were so massive. He had taxes. He got a special

tax from the non-Muslims in his domain,

...