Throughout the 16th century, wars raged across Europe as kings and republics jostled for wealth and power. Yet one man exceeded all these medieval princes of Christendom: Suleiman the Magnificent. As ruler of the Ottoman Empire, he governed 25 million people from Constantinople, his realm stretching from Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. Turning his gaze […]
How an engineer stopped Sultan Suleiman from conquering Rhodes
How could an engineer stop the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and his huge army from conquering the Knights Hospitaller on their island of Rhodes? By being a superb underground warfare tactician, Edoardo Albert explains. This is the story behind his new book, The Man Who Stopped the Sultan. The drum began to chime. This […]
Hungary’s vanished village Jews
Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country. In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in […]
Sultana Isabel: Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Empire
Historian and award-winning author Jerry Brotton on Elizabethan England’s alliance with the Islamic world. Historical events have a way of overtaking a book. When This Orient Isle was published in March 2017, I hoped that it might enable some calmer reflection on the status of today’s British Muslim community by seeing it within a much longer […]