“Facts are not truth,” wrote Hilary Mantel in her 2017 Reith Lectures on the boundaries of history and fiction. “And history is not the past,” she continued. “It is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.”
The historian and the novelist have different responsibilities in how to sift through the past and extract a deeper truth from it. Mantel’s own triumph in the Wolf Hall trilogy was the result of scrupulous historical research into the Tudor period to tell the reader, as she puts it, “what else it means” beyond the surviving record.
How much harder to attempt such a historical and fictional balancing act in writing about a society very different from your own, as in the case of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Golden Throne — historical non-fiction that treads into the novelist’s domain. It is the second book in a planned trilogy on the life of the greatest of all Ottoman sultans, Suleiman I, known in the west as “the Magnificent” (1494-1566), and a close contemporary of the Tudor King Henry VIII.
Suleiman’s reign from 1520 to 1566 is widely regarded as the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from Baghdad and Cairo to the gates of Vienna, and ruled over 25mn people of every imaginable faith. The Christian rulers of Venice, France and Tudor England all vied for alliances with Suleiman, fearing him even more than the other great global ruler of the day, the Habsburg emperor Charles V.
The Golden Throne begins where the highly acclaimed first book in the projected trilogy, The Lion House, left off in 1534, with Suleiman’s Franco-Ottoman alliance with King Francis I. What follows is a breathless narrative that races from Paris to Istanbul via Persia, the north African battlefields of Tunis and Algiers and the killing fields of the Balkans.
De Bellaigue recounts the epic Mediterranean naval conflicts between the Turkish Hayreddin Barbarossa and his Christian adversary Andrea Doria (oddly omitted from the dramatis personae), describing the dangerous realpolitik that creates then murderously shatters alliances between Sunni, Shia, Catholic and Protestant. Martin Luther has a (drunken) walk-on part as de Bellaigue explores how the rise of Protestantism fractures Christian Europe and leads to a fascinating strategic alliance between Sunni Muslim Turks, Lutheran Christians and anti-Habsburg French. The book ends in 1552 with the sultan presiding over the murder of his son Mustafa on charges of treason.
At the centre of this web of global political intrigue sits the inscrutable Suleiman, the consummate yet unknowable ruler. The tenuous psychological thread in de Bellaigue’s story is the sultan’s attempt to balance his geopolitical scheming with his complex family life akin to a Turkish version of Succession. Marrying his consort Hürrem (or Roxelana) leaves him vulnerable to the manipulation of his former consort Mahidevran, mother to his eldest son and heir apparent Mustafa, and the counsel of his son-in-law and grand vizier, the Bosnian-born Rüstem Pasha.
Novelists such as Orhan Pamuk in My Name Is Red (1998) and Elif Shafak in The Architect’s Apprentice (2013) have taken this period and woven magical psychological narratives out of what Mantel called “our ignorance of the past”. De Bellaigue tries to sit somewhere between such fiction and historical non-fiction (there’s a short if rather uneven bibliography), but ends up falling down on both fronts. It’s one laboured, cliché-ridden description of a grim atrocity after another, which occasional quotes from Suleiman’s poetry do little to help reveal “what else it means”, as Mantel puts it.
The problem is compounded by de Bellaigue’s writing. Quotes from contemporary letters and diplomatic reports by Muslims and Christians only intimate a more complex world of fluid personal, political and religious identities. This complexity could have been explored in the hinterland between fact and fiction, but is drowned out by sometimes excruciating prose.
Suleiman is “a horsey person”, has a “convert chum”, and goes around “bashing unbelievers”. Barbarossa is a “grizzled sexed-up bugaboo”: when he lands in Toulon with his young wife, they “kick off their slippers and get acquainted”; he and Doria are “the Mediterranean’s celebrity sailors”. Stolen ducats are “trousered”, and a diplomat is a “serial bullshitter”. After more accounts of castration and strangulation, de Bellaigue suggests, “You get the picture”. It’s hard to do so through the thicket of painfully anachronistic prose.
The result is baffling as historical fiction and questionable as fact. For example, I don’t know of any evidence that Ottoman architects used brass from deconsecrated English churches, as de Bellaigue claims. He reproduces many anti-Turkish Christian polemics at face value, while primary Ottoman sources are largely unused and it’s unclear if de Bellaigue is fluent in Turkish.
The book’s downbeat ending suggests a third and final volume is to come. One hopes the resulting book will avoid the clichés here, because The Golden Throne is certainly not, as has been claimed by some, Wolf Hall for the Ottoman Empire.
The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue Bodley Head £22, 272 pages
Jerry Brotton is author of ‘Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction’ (Allen Lane)
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