The tenth Ottoman sultan, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, the longest of any Ottoman ruler, and presided over the empire at its height — he took Belgrade, Rhodes, and Hungary, besieged Vienna, dominated the Mediterranean, systematized the secular law that earned him the name 'the Lawgiver,' and patronized a golden age of Ottoman art and architecture, while the same reign was marked by the brutal logic of dynastic succession that led him to order the deaths of two of his own sons and his closest friend.
In the West they called him the Magnificent, and the name fit the spectacle: an empire spanning three continents, a navy that dominated much of the eastern Mediterranean, an army at the gates of Vienna, a capital crowded with mosques rising under the greatest architect of the age. But his own people did not call him that. To them he was Kanuni, the Lawgiver, the sultan who put the empire's law in order and made it more regular and predictable. Both names point at the same man, and both leave something out. The ruler who built and codified and patronized was also the father who had his ablest son strangled, and then a second son killed, and his former intimate favorite and grand vizier executed in the night. Magnificence and that other thing were not two reigns. They were one.