Page 6 - ISLAM Rock n Roll

war, Mehmed ii invited the celebrated artist Gentile Bellini (d. 1507) to Istanbul to paint his portraits that were meant to put Mehmed on a par with his European rivals.
Yet Mehmed ii was principally a soldier, and he cam- paigned against his neighbours until his death in 1481,
by which time he had conquered Serbia, the Morea (the Peloponnese in Greece), lands along the Black Sea coast of Europe, Wallachia (part of present-day Romania), Bosnia and Otranto, in southern Italy, as well as in icting a resounding defeat on the ruler of western Persia, Uzun Hasan Aq Qoyunlu, at the battle of Bashkent in 1473.
His successors continued these triumphs and under- took two decisive campaigns in the early 16th century
that signi cantly a ected the course of Ottoman history. During the rst of these, in 1514, at the Battle of Chaldiran, in present-day Azerbaijan, the ninth Ottoman sultan, Selim i (d. 1520), defeated the newly created Safawid state in Iran with the aid of gunpowder weaponry, invading northwest Iran and ransacking the shrine of Shaykh Sa al-Din at the Safawids’ spiritual home of Ardabil. Chalidran con rmed the rivalry between the Ottomans and the Safawids, a continuation of Mehmed’s response to the challenge of Uzun Hasan and his Turkoman followers from eastern Anatolia, and it initiated a century of hostility. In the second campaign, in 1516–1517, the Ottomans conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the Hijaz, bringing to an end
the Mamluk dynasty and taking over control of trade in the eastern Mediterranean, while also placing the holy cities
of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.
This campaign also saw the last puppet Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil (d. 1543), brought to Istanbul, where he was deposed, the Ottomans henceforth claiming as their role
as Islam’s rightful protectors.
A Magni cent Reign
In 1520, a er the death of Selim i, came the tenth Ottoman sultan, Sulayman i, also known as Sulayman the Magni cent (d. 1566). Under this sultan the Ottoman Empire began to reach its greatest extent, stretching from Hungary in the west to Iraq, the Hijaz and Yemen in the east and across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco in the south. As with Mehmed ii, Sulayman i’s self-image was emblazoned on the buildings he erected:
I am a servant of God and I am the master in this world. ... God’s virtue and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions.
I am Sulayman and my name is being read in the prayers in the holy cities of Islam. I launched eets in the Mediterranean ... as well as in the Indian Ocean. I am the Shah of Baghdad and Iraq, Caesar of the Roman lands and the Sultan of Egypt. I took the land and crown of the Hungarian king and granted it to one of my humble servants ...
Through such claims, Sulayman i established his religious legitimacy. His name being mentioned in Friday prayer, a tradition that was reserved for Caliphs, Imams and Sultans while his active patronage of mosques, madrasas and other religious institutions included generous endowments (waqfs) to maintain both them and their scholars and attendants.
It is, however, for his patronage of the famous grand mu i of Istanbul (scholar) Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574) that Sulayman i became most known and as a result of
which he was called Sulayman the Lawgiver
(Kanuni). The kanun or legal codes were compendia of regulations ( rmans) supplementary to Islamic law that were issued by the Sultan. These decrees, drawing on Muslim and Byzantine traditions, included
laws pertaining to commerce, taxation, landholding, military
and administrative matters. Issues governed by the kanun were therefore applicable to all subjects regardless of ethnicity or faith, whereas the Hana
Detail from a 16th-century portrait of Sulayman i attributed to school of the Venetian painter Titian (d. 1576), and Sulayman’s stylised royal insignia or tughra made between 1555–1560. The Ottoman sultans applied the tughra
to their written royal edicts. Under Sulayman, the sultan’s tughra became standardised and typically included the sultan’s name, his father’s name, and the sultan’s title and epithet. Tughras were o en artistically embellished. Here, Sulayman’s tughra is lled in with gold and blue scrolling vines and owers and sprays of red owers.
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