Suleiman The Magnificent 1520 1566 (36 page)

If the great Sultan is to be reproached at all for the disasters which ensued after his death, it is because of his dealings with the members of his own family. The Ottoman Empire was first and foremost a despotism, and no despotism can be successful unless its despot is able and energetic. It is incredible that as shrewd a judge of men as Suleiman should have failed to realize that Mustafa and Bayezid were better stuff than Selim; and in so far as the latter's succession was due to the influence of Roxe-

37 Leopold von Ranke's Die Osmanen und die Spanische Monarchie, though written more than a hundred years ago, is still well worth consulting on this point.

^Lybyer, pp. 110-113; Halil Ganem, Les Sultans ottomans, z vols. (Paris, 1901-02), I, 195-206.

lana, "Khurrem" was doubtless responsible for much. But the Sultan could not foresee the full consequences of yielding to her blandishments. His faith in the blood of Osman was unshaken. He at least had bequeathed to his successor the ablest of Grand Vizirs, and we must judge him by what he brought to pass In the age in which he lived, rather than by the events of the future, which he could not hope to control. Like all the rest of us, he had his triumphs and his failures, but he won far more often than he lost. Of the grandeur of the work he accomplished, and of the extent of his influence on the destinies of three continents, there can be no doubt, and his character will bear comparison with those of the best of his contemporaries. Since he was the official champion of the Crescent against the Cross, It was impossible that the Christian writers of his own day and generation should do him justice, but the modern verdicts have been far more fair. The longer one studies him, the greater he seems to be.

A Note on Some of the Portraits of Suleiman the Magnificent

Like his great grandfather Mohammed II, Suleiman the Magnificent does not seem to have felt it necessary literally to observe the precept of the imams to avoid pictures and images "as abominations invented by the Devil." Yet I can find evidence of only two Western European artists who unquestionably made pictures of the great Sultan from life, and the work of the earlier of these can scarcely be called a portrait. It is a drawing by Peter Coeck van Aelst (or Alost) made in Constantinople in 1533, and shows Suleiman on horseback, preceded by- twelve "hacquebutiers ou archiers" and followed by two of his "plus nobles Chambrelains," at the end of a procession about the streets of the Turkish capital. This picture is reproduced between pages 174 and 175 of this volume. (Cf. also Th. Wiegand "Der Hippodrom von Konstanti-nopel zur Zeit Suleiman's d. Gr." in Jahrbuch des Kaiser-Hch Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts, XXIII, for 1908, 4-5. The "plus nobles Chambrelains" are here described as "JanitscharenofHziere.") This drawing and six others of different scenes on the way to Constantinople were published, from woodblocks, by Coeck's widow, at Antwerp in 1553, and there is one perfect copy of them in the print room of the British Museum. They were reproduced by Sir William Stirling-Maxwell in 1873 ' m a privately printed portfolio volume entitled The Turks in MDXXXIII, of which only one hundred copies were put forth. Stirling-Maxwell's work contains many precious

facts about Coeck van Aelst, and a wealth of other information besides.

The other western artist who portrayed Suleiman from life was a Dane, Melchior Lorichs, Lorch, or Lorck, born at Flensborg in Schleswig about 1527, who managed to attach himself to the embassy of Ogier de Busbecq, reached Constantinople early in 1556, and remained there "vierthalb Jahr." (Cf. Hans Harbeck, Melchior Lorichs, Hamburg, 1911.) He did two engravings of Suleiman, both apparently in 1559. The more famous is the full-length portrait, which forms the frontispiece to the present volume, and of which there are excellent impressions in the National Bibliothek and in the Albertina in Vienna; the other is a head and shoulders, of which there is an impression in the Metropolitan Art Museum of New York; it is also reproduced on page 195 of G F. A. von Liitzow, Geschichte des deutschen Kupferstiches und Holzschnittes (Berlin, 1891), and also on page 4 of Konstantinopel unter Suleiman dem Grossen, aztfgenommen im Jahre 1559 durch Melchior Lorichs aus Flensburg, herausgegeben und erlaii-tert von Eugen Oberhummer (Munich, 1902). This last book is principally a collection of reproductions of twenty-two drawings, made by Lorichs between 1556 and 1560. The originals are in the library of the University of Ley den. Cf. also F. Kenner, "Die Portratsammlungen des Erzher-zog's Ferdinand von Tirol," in Jahrbuch der Kunsthisto-rischen Sammhmgen des Allerhochsten (Oesterrei-chischen) Kaiserhauses (hereinafter referred to as Samm-lungen), XIX (Vienna, 1898), 129; also G. Ladner, "Zur Portratsammlung des Erzherzog Ferdinand von Tirol," in Mitteilungen des Oesterreichischen Instituts fur Ge-schichtsforschungj Band XLVII, pp. 470-482 (Innsbruck, 1933); Elfried Bock, Die Deutsche Graphik (1922), p. 223; and Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur (Leipzig, 1866), IX, 508, no. 4.

We next come to several portraits made by western artists who never saw their subject. What their work was based on it is impossible definitely to say. Many descriptions of Suleiman, as we have already pointed out, had reached Venice, and not improbably further west, and the portraits follow them very closely; it is also perfectly possible that some drawing, miniature, or medal of the Sultan may have somehow got to Europe, Leo Planiscig, Die Estensische Kumtsammlung, Katalog (Vienna, 1919), I, 185, no. 385, and Tafel 16, describes and gives a reproduction of a medal with a profile of the Sultan on it and the inscription Solyman Imp. Tur. which he ascribes to Alfonso Citadella, commonly called Lombardi. He is of the opinion that the profile of the Sultan was made shortly after his accession, or at the time of his expedition against Belgrade in 15 21. Cf. here A. Armand, Les Medailleurs Italiens, second edition (Paris, 1883), I, 180-181. There were, besides, the portraits by Gentile Bellini of Suleiman's great-grandfather, Mohammed II (cf. ante p. 16), whom Suleiman was known to resemble; and one of them, or at least a copy of it, had certainly reached Venice by the time of Suleiman's accession. (Bayezid II, who was far more scrupulous in his obedience to the imams than was his father, sold all the latter's pictures and other objets (Tart in the bazaars of Constantinople. Cf. L. Thuasne, Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed 77, p. 32.) Of these portraits of Suleiman, by artists who had never seen him, the earliest and most famous is the profile by Albrecht Diirer. It is a silver-point drawing, dated 1526 (the year of the battle of Mohacs), and the original is in the Musee Bonnat at Bayonne (cf. Panofsky, Diirer (1943), II, 107, No. 1039); it is reproduced opposite page 76 of this book. It is not without interest that Diker should have been the artist. He had paid two long visits to Venice, in 1494-95 and in 1505-07, and had made

friends and established connections there. Venice was the gateway to the Levant; is it not likely that some kind of a representation of the Sultan found its way into the hands of the great artist of Nuremberg? We can only surmise, with the data at present available, but the general resemblance of the profile to that drawn by Coeck van Aelst in 1 5 3 3 suggests that Diker had more than the many descriptions of the aspect of the Sultan by the bailos at Constantinople to guide him. In any case it would seem clear that Diirer's silver-point was copied by the Augsburg engraver Hieronymus Hopfer—-probably soon after Suleiman laid siege to Vienna; the two portraits are almost exactly alike, though the face is turned in opposite directions; moreover Hopfer's older and more distinguished brother Daniel also did an equestrian portrait of the Sultan, in which the face is essentially the same. These two Hopfer portraits are reproduced on pp. 47—50 of StMing-MaxwelPs The Tiirks in MDXXXIII; the head and shoulders, by Hieronymus, may also be seen opposite page 166 of Stanley Lane-Poole's Turkey (1891). Thieme-Becker's Kilnstler-Lexicon gives much valuable information about the Hopfers. The "Ver-kleinertes Facsimile eines anonym Holzschnittes aus dem ersten Drittel des 16 Jahrhunderts" on p. 675 of G. F. Hertzberg's Geschichte der Eyzantiner und des Osma-nischen Reiches (Berlin, 1883) is obviously copied either from Diirer or Hopfer. Another "anonymous" profile of Suleiman is reproduced on page 566 of Richard Knolles's Generall Historic of the Turkes ( 1603), and the same portrait (in reverse) forms the frontispiece of J. Chesneau's Le Voyage de Monsieur d'Aramon, ed. Ch. Scheffer (Paris, 1887). The Introduction to Chesneau's book (p. Ix) tells us that the picture was taken from a "Recueil" en-tided Vita et Icones Sultanorum Turcicorum, published at Frankfort in 1596, and reedited there by Johann Am-inon in 1648; but this book I have been unable to find.

Agostino de' Musi (often known as Agostino Veneziano) also did an engraving of the Sultan in 1535, now in the National Gallery at Budapest: it is reproduced opposite p. 294 of E. Sayous, Histoire Generate des Hongrois (1900).

There is a story that Suleiman sent the historian Jovius a portrait of himself (probably a miniature) together with an inkwell and a golden pen shortly after Jovius' retirement to his villa on Lake Como in 1535, and that the historian proudly exhibited it as one of the gems of his collection there. (Cf. A. L. Millin, Voyage dans le Milanais (Paris, 1817), I, 335, n. i; Sammlungen, XIX, 128, note i; E. Miintz, "La Musee des Portraits de Paul Jove," in Memoires de rinstitut Nationale de France (Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres), hereinafter cited as Memoires > XXXVI (1901), 307.) The tale may well be true. Jovius had dedicated his Turcicarum Rerum Commentarius to Charles V at Rome in January 1531, and it was frequently reprinted in Latin and Italian in the next ten years (the Latin edition at Paris in 15 3 8, and the Italian one at Venice in 1540 are the most important). It was also translated into English by Peter Ashton, and was published in London in 1546, under the title of "A shorte treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles." The book in fact had served to make Western Europe cognizant of the power of the Ottoman Empire and of its ruler as it had never been before; and though Suleiman was the most loyal of Moslems, he was by no means averse to having his name and fame spread abroad among Christians. He was doubtless gratified by the appearance of Jovius' book, and may well have taken this method of showing it. There is also an interesting tale of an " exchange" by which Khaireddin Barbarossa, while wintering in southern France in 1543, gave Virginio Orsini a box containing the portraits of eleven Sultans, and of Jovius' borrowing it from Orsini, "um sie in einem gfos-

seren Formate kopieren zu lassen." (Cf. E. Miintz, in Zeitschrift fur Bucherfreunde, Achter Jahrgang (1904-05), p. 123. Miintz, in Memoires, XXXI, 307, also declares that there is an engraving of Jovius' picture of the Sultan in the UfEzi, but the catalogues I have been able to consult do not bear him out.) In any case, we have a reproduction of a woodcut of Suleiman, in profile, by the German engraver Tobias Stimmer, on page 372 of the Basel (1575) edition of Jovius' Elogia virorwn bellica virtute illustrium, which was unquestionably copied from the portrait of Suleiman in the historian's collection. (Cf. Max Bendel, Tobias Stimmer (1940), pp. 18, 89; and G F. Kossman, "Giovio's Portratsammlung und Tobias Stimmer," in An-zeiger -fur Schiveizerische Altertumskunde, Neue Folge, XXIV (for 1922), 49-53.) Summer's woodcut is quite recognizable as that of the same man who is depicted in the portraits previously enumerated.

A word should be added here about the portraits of Suleiman by Titian. On August 23, 1538, Benedetto Ag-nello wrote to Duke Federigo Gonzaga that since the Duke desired to possess a portrait of the Sultan, Titian "ha fatto uno, cavato (se non me inganno) da una medaglia e da un altro retratto," and had done it so well that many who had been in Constantinople declared that it was absolutely true to life (cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, His Life and Times, II, 498). This picture is lost. It is said that a "Kup-ferstich" of it by Boldrini is preserved (cf. Sammlungen, XIX, 128), but I have been unable to find any evidence of it. Nor can I discover any trace of the equestrian portrait of Suleiman which Titian is said to have painted in 1561-62 for Cardinal Ercole de Gonzaga "da una carta fatta far in Constantinopoli" (cf. Sammlungen, XIX, 128). But there seems little doubt that the model drawing, miniature, or medal from which this picture, and possibly that of 15 3 8,

was made was the same as that used for the figure of "a Turk, the counterfeit of Sultan Soliman, in a white turban" which brings up the rear of the procession in the great "Ecce Homo" now in Vienna, which Titian painted in 1543. "It was natural that Soliman, whose likeness Titian had so often taken from medals, should be numbered amongst those who asked for the blood of Christ" (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 94-95).

Sixteenth-century Europe was probably less familiar with any of these portraits of Suleiman than with another which was issued in broadsheet form by the Nuremburg publisher Hans Guldenmund (1490?-!560), and was consequently more easily accessible to the general public. It is a full length engraving of Suleiman, in profile and standing up, by Michael Ostendorfer (1490?-! 559) of Ratis-bon; it is dated 1548, and the original is now in Gotha. There is a good reproduction of it in Deutsche Einblatt-Hohschnitt m der erst en Halfte des XVI fahrhunderts, no. 978; and no. 979 is a genealogical tree of the sovereigns of the House of Osman, with their busts, also by Ostendorfer, who was evidently much interested in the Turks (cf. Bilder-Katalog zu Max Geisberg, p. 172). There is no evidence as to where Ostendorfer got his information about Suleiman's looks, although his picture bears a general resemblance to the others already enumerated, but he makes the Sultan appear particularly ferocious; in fact, it is quite likely that he had it issued by Guldenmund in broadsheet form in order to warn his countrymen of the imminence of the "Turkish peril" This picture is reproduced on the jacket of this book and also opposite page 257 of the text. Guldenmund himself also did an equestrian engraving of Suleiman, which seems much more true to life, at the time of the siege of Vienna in 1529, but it does not seem probable that it was ever given wide publicity. A