Speakable Turk

SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT [370 pp.) —Harold Lamb—Doubleday ($5).

For a few wild weeks in the summer of 1529, it seemed to be the end of Europe. The Unspeakable Turk, Sultan Suleiman Khan, had smashed the Hungarian capital of Buda and thundered on, 170 incredible miles in one week, to the gates of Vienna. In an instant, Europe broke off its feuds. France and the Holy Roman Empire patched up a quick truce; even the Pope and Martin Luther buried the ecclesiastical mace for the time being. Twenty days later it was all over, and everybody felt a bit silly. The invader packed up his plunder and poled off down the Danube.

But the career of Sultan Suleiman (rhymes with rule a don), last of the great Osmanli Turks, was just beginning. Harold Lamb's biographical narrative, Suleiman the Magnificent, tells the story of his reign with the skill that has made Lamb's retraces of history (from Genghis Khan to The March of Muscovy") among the most popular in print.

By the time of the great raid on Austria, Suleiman had begun to suspect that the Turk had ridden as far as he could on the road of conquest, and that it was time to squat on the carpet of diplomacy and consolidate the great adventure into a great state. Accordingly, the Sultan struck alliances with France and Venice, reorganized the legal code, expanded the educational system, opened his borders to European immigration, and announced the pax Turcica.

The pax was ably defended by a small, deadly force of janissaries (most of them Christian children, adopted by the state, and trained in fanatical devotion to the Sultan) and by the new Turkish fleet. Under a pair of swashbuckling corsairs, Khair-ad-Din Barbarossa and Dragut, the Mediterranean was swept clean, for more than a century, of European fleets.*

Yet even before Suleiman's long reign (1520-66) was ended, the Turk had a taste of the maladies (corruption, harem government) that were to make him one day the Sick Man of Europe. Suleiman, contends Lamb, is not to be blamed for the subsequent decline of his people; history forced him into the role of a bureaucratizer, a Turkish Diocletian, and he filled it ably. He showed mercy to his enemies, and was remarkably faithful to his wife. He was, in fact, a quite speakable fellow.