When Suleiman the Magnificent died during the siege of Szigetvar in 1566, his inner circle hid his death from the army for 48 days. This episode looks beyond his famous title to the bookish young sultan who surprised European diplomats, raised his friend Pargali Ibrahim from royal falconer to grand vizier, and pushed the empire’s borders from Belgrade and Rhodes to Mohacs, where he wept over the drowned Hungarian king.

We look at the limits of conquest at Vienna, his wars with the Safavids and the Portuguese, and his work as Kanuni, the Lawgiver, alongside Ebussuud Efendi and the architect Mimar Sinan. We then turn to his marriage to Hurrem, the start of the Sultanate of Women, the executions of Ibrahim and his son Mustafa, the civil war between his remaining sons, and why modern historians reject the idea that the empire declined after him.

• Why Suleiman made a formerly enslaved falconer the head of his government
• Rhodes, Mohacs, the failed sieges of Vienna, and the logistics that limited Ottoman expansion
• How the kanun harmonized secular law with sharia and protected minority communities
• Hurrem’s rise from captive to legal wife and political power, and the poetry Suleiman wrote as Muhibbi
• The law of fratricide, the deaths of Ibrahim, Mustafa, and Bayezid, the four-tiered crown, and the spread of the tulip