The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King, Christopher De Bellaigue, Bodley Head, £22

In 1524 the total population of England and Wales is estimated to have been 2.3 million, rising to 2.9 million in 1550. Henry VIII, who became king in 1509, enjoyed a reign of almost 38 years, in which he joined forces with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V against Francis I of France and founded the Royal Navy, seeing it grow to include some 40 ships. By contrast the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, whose reign lasted from 1520 to 1566, presided over an empire of around 26 million persons and fought wars on several fronts.

‘There is no question of international politics that does not involve him,’ writes Christopher De Bellaigue in his new book about the middle years of Suleyman’s reign, The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King. The wars fought by Christian monarchs ‘are bagatelles, conducted close to home and with all ease, while the Sultan must cover half the earth before he even finds an enemy’. Compared to the navies of the Ottoman Sultan, Henry VIII’s Royal Navy was a minnow.

De Bellaigue wrote about Suleyman’s early life and the first 18 years of his reign in The Lion House: The Rise of Suleyman the Magnificent (2022), which was garlanded with praise by reviewers. It was variously described as daring, gripping, cinematic, mind-enlarging, even soul-enriching. One reviewer glibly dubbed it Wolf Hall for the Ottoman Empire. Readers of that book will be familiar with de Bellaigue’s quirky, non-academic approach, which entails present-tense narration and, from time to time, a curious and galling choice of language.

Rather than write a single volume of several hundred pages, De Bellaigue has chosen to divide Suleyman’s life into three books of around 200 pages each, doubtless with the hope of making each book a more wieldy beach read and thereby optimising his royalties. His market is the educated general reader of history who relishes a spirited yarn written in captivating prose.

Just who is the narrator of this historical tale, which is neither a typical history book nor an historical novel, though it contains elements of both? At first he seems like a traditional omniscient narrator, albeit a somewhat chummy one. Is he (most surely he is a he) a courtier or a diplomat similar to the narrators of Gore Vidal’s ancient historical novels, Julian and Creation? Where is he from? Where do his loyalties lie? It is never clear.

Our narrator starts off talking about Paris in 1534, where Francis I of France (known as ‘the Most Christian King’) receives a delegation of Turkish gentlemen and orders the public burning of Lutheran heretics. Francis tells the Venetian ambassador that he wants the Turkish Sultan ‘to enfeeble the Emperor’s might [and] put him to heavy expense’. But then he had hoped to become Holy Roman Emperor himself.

Our narrator might plausibly have been a member of the Turkish delegation, for later he has become a wordly-wise resident of Istanbul who notes that ‘prostitutes are far from rare in this city of ours’.

Apart from waging war against the Holy Roman Emperor in conjunction with Francis I in southern France, Suleyman’s forces harry the western coast of Italy looking for a point of entry, they push westwards into Hungary again, they push eastwards into the lands of the Persian Shah, taking Baghdad and venturing into the Caucasus, and they conquer Aden on the way to challenging the Portuguese in north-western India. All the while, England’s Henry VIII is struggling to maintain a continental toehold in Calais.

At this stage in his reign, Suleyman’s heart has been conquered by his Ruthenian concubine Roxelanna, known also as Hurrem or the Haseki (Special Friend), who has borne him four sons and a daughter. She writes him affectionate and worshipful letters while he is away fighting campaigns. ‘I rub my face in the dirt under your feet and kiss your auspicious hand,’ she wrote, insisting also that her ‘liver is a seared kebab from fear and longing’, while he returns the compliment by sending her love poems, one of which uses a polo metaphor and offers his head ‘as a ball for your mallet’. His self-abasement is a literary pose, however, since he has no intention of conceding power to anyone. Hurrem is a purveyor of soft power with the people, through her philanthropy and her sponsorship of Sinan the architect, who has already proved himself an adept engineer serving the military.

In Suleyman’s world, brutality is the norm. The Portuguese commander Francisco Pacheco, who surrenders a redoubt to Hadim Suleyman, one of the sultan’s admirals, near Diu in India, is beheaded and his head flayed, its skin salted and filled with straw.

Courtiers are violently dispatched in Christian Europe as well. George Matruzzi rises from a mere monk to become regent of Hungary as well as a cardinal, but falls prey to the machinations of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Sultan, and the dowager Queen of Hungary, who resents his arrogance and his accumulation of wealth that exceeds her own. He is first stabbed with a dagger, then struck by a sword, and finally blasted by arquebuses.

The curse of a king referred to in the book’s full title is the brutal logic of the peculiar Ottoman system of succession. Suleyman is following the example of earlier sultans, who merrily produced male heirs, dispatched them once full-grown to govern provinces of the empire, and favoured one such to succeed him, who was expected to murder any brother and, in some cases, any maternal uncles as well. (The Holy Roman Emperors, by contrast, secured their empire through marital alliances; Charles V allowed his younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand of Europe, to run central Europe for him.)

Hurrem forms a cabal with Grand Vizier Rustem, a former pig-breeder, to ensure that her offspring prosper. She marries off her daughter to Rustem and together they cause Suleyman to believe that Mustafa, his eldest son by a previous consort, Mahidevran, is conspiring to overthrow him with the support of the Janissaries, the elite infantry corps recruited mainly from Christian populations in the Balkans. Mustafa goes to remonstrate with his father in his tent, but is ensnared by three mutes who strangle him as his father looks on with a horsehair bowstring – they actually need three bowstrings to do the job. Mustafa’s son Mehmet is also murdered. This is the point at which de Bellaigue stops, leaving Suleyman’s final years for the third book. The alternative scenario was that Mustafa would have eventually succeeded to the Golden Throne and instead murder Hurrem’s surviving sons.

De Bellaigue’s overall approach is modish and attention-seeking. Nobody could deny his scholarship, although the omission from his bibliography of Harold Lamb’s 1951 biography of Suleyman, which remains the best one-volume account of his reign, is puzzling. Chronology is a casualty here and I sometimes had to go back through his pages to work out what year we are in.

Yet it is de Bellaigue’s choice of language that is most troubling. Something is described as ‘not a good look’, which is an especially recent idiom. One of the Sultan’s consorts is called ‘a stunner’, which is straight from the lexicon of a British tabloid hack. The French diplomat Captain Polin is ‘without the love handles’ of his predecessor.

An Ottoman campaign chronicler who writes gushingly about the south coast of France is said to be ‘on retainer from the Toulon tourist board’. Honeymooning in Toulon, Suleyman’s ferocious admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa and his new wife are said to ‘take their downtime seriously’.

Indeed, Barbarossa is also described as ‘a great, grizzled sexed-up bugaboo’. A bugaboo is a word meaning ‘an imaginary object of fear’ or ‘something that causes fear or distress out of proportion to its importance’. (It is also, with a capital B, a brand of pushchair for babies and toddlers.) The fact that I felt impelled to look up the usage of this word shows that it is hardly conducive to easy understanding. And the term ‘sexed-up’ is most famous for being applied to the ‘dodgy dossier’ that was rendered by Alastair Campbell in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. What de Bellaigue really means is that Barbarossa is highly sexed or possibly over-sexed.

The reckless clatter of modern idiom is unrelenting. A hippopotamus in the Sultan’s menagerie, known as the Lion House, is called ‘this car crash of an animal’. A basilica converted into a mosque has ‘a personality disorder’. When the Sultan builds a memorial mosque it ‘has a lot to do with swinging dicks’, a phrase that derives from 1980s Wall Street, where it applied to senior market traders. To emphasise the importance of falling back on the Sultan’s protective embrace, de Bellaigue’s narrator says that ‘sooner or later everyone needs Daddy’. You get the picture.

In these irritating and distracting instances de Bellaigue is reminiscent of a ‘trendy’ schoolmaster who likes to use slang and dirty words in front of his pupils in a somewhat pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself.

It is a pity because his book would be immensely better without these vulgar excrescences. The best historical writing is, of course, an illusion, but an illusion that is self-consuming only serves to undermine the narrative. De Bellaigue is plainly committed to this approach and the final book in the series is bound to be similarly irksome.