Published on 23 Apr 2016
Suleiman lost faith in those who surrounded him, fearing that they schemed to replace him. Why do we so rarely see such destructive suspicion in our governments today? We also need to talk about what made the West dub Suleiman “Magnificent,” and the flourishing of arts and education which took place under his reign.
Towards the end of his reign, Suleiman saw his once trusted advisor, Ibrahim Pasha, and his own son, Mustafa, as enemies rather than allies. He feared that they would displace him to put Mustafa on the throne. Why don’t we see such distrust turn into murder in our governments today, when it was such a common trope in the ancient world? Perhaps it’s because our modern governments provide a regular means of succession, so that anyone with ambition is usually better served waiting for their turn rather than trying to take on the entire government.
The series was too short to allow us to give Suleiman’s reign the coverage it really deserved, but we want to take advantage of this opportunity to talk about why the West dubbed him “Suleiman the Magnificent” and his people called him “The Lawgiver.” The laws he put so much effort into rewriting improved equality in the society, including creating additional protections for Christians and Jews within his Muslim empire. He was also a patron of the arts, and even a poet himself, under whose reign a distinctive Ottoman style developed and many beautiful buildings were constructed. Finally, as a leader of armies, he took many cities that were considered the bulwark of European defense against the Ottomans, and though he had huge armies to do it, many huge armies had failed at those tasks before since the cities were heavily fortified and actually had the odds stacked in their own favor.
May 21, 2016
Suleiman the Magnificent – Lies – Extra History
QotD: Teaching Shakespeare
I have the grimmest memories of being taught Shakespeare. It happened in a high school in Ontario in the ’sixties. I’m sure that my teacher meant well. It was on the curriculum, and what could she do? It started with Romeo and Juliet, in connexion with which we were taken to see a movie. This was also called “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. Tell the truth, I fell in love with the actress — for hours; days maybe. But then I’ve always been a fool for women. We were taught not the play, but the movie; then as we moved on to The Merchant of Venice (I think it was, I wasn’t paying much attention) we were taught not the play, but “what it all means.” I can only bear that when the teacher has some notion of what it all might mean, herself.
My interest focused curiously enough not on Romeo, nor Juliet, nor any of the powers at play in Verona, but on Friar Laurence, and his charitable if somewhat naive efforts to prevent bad things from happening. Shakespeare here and elsewhere had the nerve to present Catholic monks and nuns in a good light, after they’d been scoured from the English landscape. Pay attention, and know anything at all about his times, and one will see that he has consistently reversed the “stereotypes” promoted in Elizabethan England. There, as here today, the traditional practitioners of religion were satirized for corruption and hypocrisy. In Shakespeare, instead, the monks and nuns scramble about trying to fix one mess or another that the worldlings have created for themselves, and somehow reconcile them with Our Lord. We see plainly who the real Christians are, and who are not. And if we want real hypocrisy and corruption — we find for instance Angelo, in Measure for Measure, with his parade of fake asceticism, and lines to echo those of contemporary “reformers.”
I mention that play as extremely topical, in light of recent events at Rome. Also, because it was once taught to me as an exposé of religious life, when it is — shriekingly — the opposite.
But by that point in my life (age fourteen) I was already a Shakespeare votary, and no high school teacher could kill my enthusiasm for him, much as she might (unwittingly) kill it in everyone else, by making a drudgery of the subject. The basic clew was missing among the pedagogues, as it still is: that this subject teaches itself. It needs only a stage, only to be pronounced, for the “music” in verse and prose to begin explaining all the words. The less prepared a student is to resist Shakespeare, the faster he will succumb to the charm. This has been tested: even before audiences in India with little knowledge of English in any dialect; or in Germany a long time ago, where English strolling players took Shakespeare when London theatres had been closed. The story of Shakespeare’s conquests, in English and a hundred other languages, is one the English themselves have hardly understood, and exhibits to my mind the truth of Kipling’s: “What do they know of England, who only England know?”
David Warren, “Teaching Shakespeare”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-01-19.
