Portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent

Suleiman ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566, and for most of that time he was the figure Christian Europe watched with real fear. His armies reached the walls of Vienna in 1529, and his fleets pressed hard across the Mediterranean. No Florentine painter ever set eyes on him, so a face like this one travelled west through drawings and medals, copied and recopied until it reached a Medici gallery. To Europeans he was simply the Grand Turk, the measure against which their own kings looked small. His own subjects knew him by a different name, the Lawgiver, for the code of law he set in order across the empire.