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De Bellaigue writes with impecable scholarship, piecing together contemporary accounts to create a thrilling narrative Church Times One of the most fascinating passages in The Lion House is de Bellaigue’s description of the process by which Venice chose its Doge, and I can't resist quoting it here: Mind you, a great story about Sulieman the legend and his murderous chums is infinitely better than no story at all, which is where I suspect most English speakers are in their knowledge of the Sultan and where I was before I started this book. Conclusion
By flashing between the Adriatic and the Bosporus, Mr de Bellaigue brings home many such links, comparisons and commonalities. Both of the port cities that he evokes brimmed with ostentatious wealth extracted from distant lands. But for all the cynicism of its governance, Venice was a law-based state where the election of the doge, for example, involved elaborate rules. The winner had to pledge respect for the established system. Indeed it might be said that ceremonies in all their variety are Mr de Bellaigue’s favourite thing. Obsessively but infectiously, he relates the finer points of political, social and military rituals. Whether he is describing a lavish dinner for Italian merchants on the Bosporus, the stately progress of Suleiman’s armies through the Balkans or a mass circumcision, he has an eye for the colourful, absurd and ironic. The Ottomans are the successors of the Byzantines. For the final century of its existence the Byzantine Empire was a lame foot inside a shoe, the shoe occupied but inert. This state of affairs lasted until 29 May 1453, when Sultan Mehmet yanked the shoe off the foot and tried it on himself. The Byzantine Empire perished. Constantinople, the Byzantines’ seat, was reborn the capital of a Muslim empire. Its new name, Istanbul. Sensuous and scholarly, meticulously researched and deliciously irreverent, The Lion House is an intoxicating journey through the Ottomans’ golden age.”It begins with a welcome pledge not to detain His Serenity with a long writing. No one wants a repeat of the epic, four-hour harangue which Andrea Gritti subjected the Senate to after he guided Venice to a disobliging draw in the War of Cambrai. Not that Doge Grimani is in a fit state to take in much of what is said. His election last year, at the age of eighty-seven, made him the oldest man ever to become Doge, and he spends much of his working day asleep. Minio replies that the Doge is particularly cognisant of the majesty of Francis but that a good peace exists no less with the Emperor. Ibrahim Pasha “the Frank” (1495-1536), Albanian convert to Islam from Christianity when enslaved, close “friend” of the Sultan and Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, long #2 to Suleyman The men shifting their posteriors on the benches of the Collegio are patricians. Their families have held power for centuries, the same names surfacing with a monotony that is at once reassuring and faintly unsavory. Venice’s oligarchy revolves gently, protecting it from dynastic struggles and allowing it to get on with what it does best, which is to ship things from A to B and make B pay through the nose.
In carrying him to success and then laying him low, Fortune has shown what stupefying jokes she is capable of.’ This is how Paulo Giovio, ecclesiastic, historian and student of events, has summarised the actions of fate on Antonio Grimani. And Fortune’s punchline came in 1521, when, after being awarded the procuratorship of St Mark’s, Grimani was elected Doge. Grimani’s eloquence and the justice of his defence saved him from execution. Exiled to Dalmatia, he absconded to Rome. From a villa on the Quirinale he agitated for his own rehabilitation while lobbying loyally on behalf of the Republic. After seven years of receiving aid from a man they had spurned, the patricians of Venice were embarrassed into bringing him home with restored honours. When an Ottoman emperor died, his son inherited the empire. But which son? With no clear rule of succession it depended upon who managed to seize power and eliminate their rivals. Conspicuous consumption was an important element of courtly life. But while we are encouraged to gawp at the ostentation this book is really about death. Death defines the key moments in the book and ultimately triggers the coming of age of the Sultan himself in the concluding scene - a lion now escaped from the Lion House. What is the structure of the book? Daughters L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Brigham Young’s ten oldest daughters were known affectionately as “The Big Ten.” They formed the original Retrenchment Society.
Maybe the author wanted this all along and the publishers have spun it this way. But I’m annoyed. I wanted a book about Suleyman the Magnificent. This is not it. First the Great Council, all twenty-five hundred of them, must be brought down by lottery to thirty. The thirty then draw lots to reduce their number to nine, who elect forty. Another lottery sifts the forty to twelve who elect the next group of twenty-five, who are in turn reduced to nine. The nine elect forty-five who draw lots to determine the eleven who will elect the forty-one. The forty-one elect the Doge.” Meanwhile Grimani’s sense of duty favourably impressed the pillars of the State; with the outbreak of war in 1499 against Sultan Bayezit, the Conqueror’s son and successor, he was given charge of the fleet and told to defend Lepanto. Whoever controls Lepanto controls the Gulf of Corinth and trade in the Morea. But when the two fleets were on the point of engaging and it seemed that the Turks might be comprehensively defeated, the wind changed and the Venetian fleet was destroyed. Francis and Charles competed for the imperial throne when it came up for election on the death of the incumbent, Charles’s grandfather Maximilian, in 1519. Charles won the contest after he borrowed a vast sum from a banking house, the Fuggers of Augsburg, enabling him to bribe his way to victory. Charles and Francis challenge each other every so often to a duel, which, for one reason or another, doesn’t materialise.
Reading Lion House is a great way to get a feel for the high politics and high flying politicians of the early 16th century Mediterranean world. I’ve been to Turkey a few times but never really got a sense of the Ottoman sultans who ruled the world from Istanbul. The Lion House is an excellent way into this world and makes me want to visit again, COVID and family permitting... In Suleyman’s case, it turns out, the laudatory label was richly deserved. Historians remember the Ottoman Empire’s tenth sultan for far more than the territorial gains he achieved, which were considerable. Because to his subjects he was known as Suleyman the Lawgiver. Like Napoleon three centuries later, he codified the laws of his empire into a single legal code that endured for more than three hundred years.This is an untruth. In the struggle between Francis and Charles for control of northern Italy, the Venetians lean towards the French. The Pashas know this. Minio knows that they know. But a fiction of Christian unity is better than no unity at all. De Bellaigue’s book revels in this contrast: the refined, luxurious courtly life and the brutality that lurked just under the surface - and was to some extent the critical underpinning of this regal lifestyle. If you know a fair amount about Suleyman as well as about Venetian politics in the 16th century, there isn’t much here that will be new to you, though it’s well told regardless, and the audiobook is narrated beautifully. We must wait to learn more. The information will bear on the life chances of Venice. At present the Sultan has his hand on Christendom’s entrails. His navy is strong enough to stop Venice’s Levantine trade whenever he wants. The Serenissima must therefore cultivate the Sultan by secretly giving him intelligence and undermining Papal efforts to win support for a Crusade, all the while assuring Rome that there is nothing Venice wants more. De Bellaigue guides us through the labyrinths of statecraft and private passions of the Ottoman court, the Doge’s palace and the geographies in between and beyond. The Lion House is full of breath-taking events at the cross-roads of empires happening at a moment in history when notions such as Europe, Asia, Christianity and Islam were infinitely more fluid and permeable than they are today.”
Bearing in mind Leo’s successor as Pope, the uncommanding Adrian, and the poor state of his finances, this, too, seems highly unlikely. Rome’s death throes sputtered out not in the fifth century, as is widely believed, but in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, “the Conqueror.” He then renamed the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire Istanbul. Yet the Ottoman Empire—eventually Rome’s rival in its vastness—did not reach its full extent until the reign of the Conqueror’s great-grandson, Suleyman “the Magnificent.” The Lion House is the story of Suleyman’s rise to greatness laid out in glorious prose. It’s the first of a planned trilogy by author Christopher de Bellaigue about the man celebrated as the longest-reigning and most influential leader of Islam after Muhammad.
Weddings at The Lion House
Sweeping... [An] appetite for detail gives the book its vividness and energy... De Bellaigue relishes luxury, spectacle and precise vocabulary. He writes with supreme confidence about power, diplomacy, clothing, avarice, war, statecraft and the exceptional brutality of the era... T he Lion House unfolds like a novel, through scenes rich with authenticating detail." Historian and journalist de Bellaigue ( Rebel Land) delivers an intricate and evocative account of 16th-century Ottoman ruler Suleyman I’s rise to power. The son of Selim I, who conquered the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517 and declared himself Caliph, or “leader of the world’s Muslims,” Suleyman survived his father’s assassination attempt via poison-dipped robe and became sultan after Selim’s death in 1520. De Bellaigue sheds light on the relationship between Suleyman and his intimate friend and adviser, the Grand Vizier Ibrahim, a former Christian slave who made the fatal mistake of “believ himself to be indispensable.” Also spotlighted are Suleyman’s mother, Hafsa, who stopped him from trying on the poisoned robe, and Hurrem, the shrewd Ruthenian slave and concubine who became his wife. Excerpts from Hurrem’s letters provide an intimate look into court life and glimpses of Suleyman’s personality, but his motivations and the origins of his willingness to overturn tradition remain somewhat mysterious. Still, de Bellaigue’s punchy, present-tense prose and use of imagined dialogue endow the complex power plays and diplomatic intrigues with a sense of immediacy, and though the narrative ends 30 years before Suleyman’s death and doesn’t include many of his most significant accomplishments, the threat he posed to European dynasties is made clear. This is an incisive portrait of a ruler on the cusp of greatness. (Nov.) Publishers Weekly While Ibrahim is sponging off of Suleyman, Alvise Gritti, the bastard son of the Venetian Doge, has his sights set on Ibrahim. This look at the Venetians' inside access to Suleyman's most trusted advisor briefly gives hope to the medieval maritime empire that increasingly found itself squeezed between Spanish and Ottoman expansion. The fact that Suleyman focused so many of his energies on Vienna and Persia, when Venice and southern Italy were more feasable targets testifies to the true loyalties of these two men with origins in Venetian lands. I liked the style of this glimpse into Suleyman’s quest to gain territory in Europe. It’s well structured narrative nonfiction that reads beautifully and compellingly. Hayreddin Barbarossa (c. 1466/1483-1546), “King of Algiers,” red-bearded Muslim pirate turned Admiral of the Ottoman Navy
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