The lady librarian was curious as to the identity of the subject of a biography I had requested - " Who was he ?" she asked. The computer turned up just one book in the whole of Liverpool { UK } on the life of Suleiman the Magnificent and that encapsulates just one reason why this site is being built. The other reason is that on my travels in the Mediterranean, many times Suleiman had been there before me and his influence was pervasive and also with the passage of time elusive. It has taken a long time to piece the story together. Despite the charisma and Romance of all things Oriental there is a great gulf in our knowledge of even the most fundamental aspects of Islamic history and life. There is no doubting the beauty of Arabic text but the lack of people { including me } able to read it in the Western world certainly contributes to misunderstandings and divergences between our cultures. Much of what we know has been distorted by a Hollywood scenario of harems and concubines and eunuchs -- not that they did not exist, they undoubtedly did, but they were only the sideshow to a main feature which has been sadly neglected.The common perception of the Turbaned Turk as a cruel war-monger also has some basis in fact but he was no less fierce than his European counterpart at every level {witness Henry V111, who was hardly a benevolent ruler }. Life in Medieval times was far harsher than we can ever imagine { no popping out for an aspirin then }.

While daily life in Turkey was harsh in those times it was certainly no worse than the life the average peasant endured in any European country. The life of Suleiman is inextricably bound up with his life long struggle against Christianity and in particular the Knights of St. John who represented to him the complete antithesis of Islam. The story of Suleiman is as exciting as any novel and any moral judgements can be left to the discerning reader. But be quite clear that there is nothing judgemental on either the Christian or Muslim side --- the following is simply an account of a time when an irrestible force met an immovable object. Neither is there any attempt to relate those far off events with what may be happening today -- as far as I can see those times were unique to those times. Contemporaries of Suleiman were Henry V111, Martin Luther, Caravaggio, Shakespeare and Cervantes. I would guess that the average citizen of modern Istanbul knows more about those luminaries than the average Westerner knows about Suleiman.