The year is 1538 and Suleyman the Magnificent has taken to signing himself “the great lord and conqueror of the whole world”. The Holy Roman Emperor might have something to say about that. Charles V is still in charge over the other side of the Ottoman empire’s European borders, from the Danube to the Baltic. All the same, there is no denying Suleyman’s vast reach. Since coming to the throne 18 years earlier he has invaded Belgrade, Rhodes, much of Hungary, Baghdad and too many Mediterranean ports to mention. He has conquered most of North Africa. True, there have been a few hitches – he failed to capture Vienna in 1529 – but still, as he sits on his golden perch in Istanbul, he is pretty much lord of all he surveys.
In his previous book, The Lion House, Christopher de Bellaigue charted Suleyman’s rise to power in rich, sinuous detail. Here, he takes the story on to the next phase as the swan-necked sultan sets about protecting his gains, doing-over his previous failures (bits of Hungary need retaking) and, most crucially, worrying about an heir. Unlike Henry VIII in faraway and inconsequential England, Suleyman isn’t short of sons. He has five, by two different mothers, but there is a terrible kicker built into the system: once an heir has been chosen (it doesn’t need to be the oldest boy), the lucky young man is expected to murder all his brothers. Selim, Suleyman’s father, killed five nephews to ensure his own boy’s smooth progression. No wonder everyone is feeling on edge as the sultan tiptoes into battle-scarred middle age.
The Golden Throne is a meticulously sourced work of narrative history, yet it employs a fictional voice that owes much to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. There’s that same use of the present tense throughout, which allows De Bellaigue’s readers to experience events at the same pace as his historical actors (it is tempting to call them “characters”). It also injects human agency into the kind of set pieces that so often bore – those interminable sea battles, that labyrinthine diplomacy, the convoluted doings of a particularly twisty pope. In De Bellaigue’s hands these complex procedurals become legible and, in their own way, thrilling. To add to the sense that the drama is unfolding in real time, the book is divided into five “Acts” and opens with a “Persons of the Drama” cast list.
Like Mantel, De Bellaigue delivers his story in a mashup of contemporary colloquialism and gorgeous descriptions. Barbarossa, the pirate chief who patrols the coasts of the Mediterranean for Suleyman is a “great grizzled sexed-up bugaboo”, Queen Isabella of Hungary is “not the airhead that people say she is”, and a Habsburg high-up is a “serial bullshitter”. The aphorisms are likewise arresting: “War is Weather”, “in summer he is a terrorist, in winter a civil servant”, “luxury isn’t security. Information is.”
The sultan may sit on a solid golden throne, but the fragilities of the human body are never far from his calculations. He employs only deaf mutes as confidential secretaries to ensure that no secrets leak out. His favoured courtiers are eunuchs, since they cannot breed themselves up into a dynasty of dissatisfaction: little boys are brought to the palace to have their penis and scrotum yanked off with a braided cord. Elderly people are made to contribute too. When a group of the sultan’s soldiers storm into a church on the isle of Lipari, the first thing they do is harvest the gallbladders of the old people hiding inside. (Apparently gall, or bile, had “many useful qualities”.)
In a cute move, Thomas Cromwell even makes a cameo appearance in De Bellaigue’s book. Henry VIII’s right-hand man is overheard saying that Francis I of France, always a thorn in the side of the Holy Roman Emperor, will happily welcome Suleyman’s army into the heart of Europe if it means that he can have Milan in exchange. There are, in addition, plenty of homegrown Cromwellians: men (and the occasional woman) from nowhere who have got to the top by making themselves useful. Into this camp falls the sultan’s own wife Roxelana, brought as a slave from Poland to Istanbul, and known these days as the sultan’s Haseki, or “special friend”. Or what about Grand Vizier Rustem, who doubles up as the emperor’s son-in-law? He started life as a pig-herder. Then there’s Hassan, the eunuch governor of Algiers, who in a former life was a Sardinian shepherd.
The Golden Throne belongs to that particular subgenre of writing clumsily called the “nonfiction novel”. This is not the same thing as historical fiction, in which the author takes the documented past and remakes it along more pleasing lines – cutting out minor characters, conflating others and jettisoning those bits of the plot that don’t quite fit. Christopher de Bellaigue does something quite different here. Sticking closely to the written records, he deploys the skills of the novelist to bring the archive thrillingly to life.
• The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
