After a few short years of peace, which Solyman used for reforms in the administration, the disturbed state of Europe drew Turkey into her troubles. The Janissaries had already been grumbling about the Sultan’s inaction, and had been sharply brought to order. Their heart’s desire, war and booty, was not long in coming to them, for Solyman decided to invade Hungary, urged by King Francis of France, who knew that such an event would annoy Charles V and distract that Emperor’s attention from the French King’s designs on Italy. With one hundred thousand men and three hundred cannon, Solyman set out at the head of his well-found army to meet the forces which Louis, King of Hungary, had gathered together to protect his country from invasion. The result was as might have been expected. Despite great bravery and devotion, because of their faulty organization and discipline, the Hungarian army was defeated at Mohacz in August, 1526; King Louis fell, eight bishops, and a great number of Magyar nobles, and with them some twenty-four thousand men. Buda-Pesth submitted to the Turks, the road to Vienna lay open, and Solyman’s victorious army carried fire and sword into the Crown lands of the House of Habsburg. Vienna trembled, but the Turks did not attempt a siege of that city and were content to return the way they came, heavy laden with plunder, carrying away one hundred thousand Christians—men, women, and children—into slavery. After a short absence in Asia Minor, Solyman felt called to Hungary again; civil war had broken out over the succession to the throne, and Solyman thought fit to hear the appeal of Zapolya, a native noble, claimant to the throne, for help against the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, brother of the Emperor.
A yet greater army gathered together at Constantinople, two hundred and fifty thousand men with three hundred cannon, and, led by Solyman, appeared before Buda-Pesth in September, 1529; the town again surrendered, after a siege of six days, and Zapolya was solemnly installed as king over the people which Arpad had led out of the East, which Stephen the Saint had brought over to Christianity, and whose iron crown now pressed upon the brow of a vassal to the Sultan. Zapolya marched with his followers in the train of Solyman, his master, to Vienna. Like the storms of autumn equinox, the Akindji tore over the fair fields of Lower Austria and surged up against the defences of Vienna, led by Michael Oglou, descendant of Michael of the Peaked Beard, who had fought by the side of the first Othman. The main army followed the swarms of Akindji, and drew a circle of camps around Vienna, which was defended by low walls and contained a garrison of only sixteen thousand men. The capital of the Holy Roman Empire was in danger, and King Ferdinand, in his distress, appealed to his brother, the Emperor, for assistance; but none came, for the German princes were quarrelling about religious matters, while Vienna suffered. The city held out under its brave defender, Count Salm, through days and nights of storm and stress, till Solyman gave up the attempt and withdrew on the day on which Count Salm died of his wounds. Before leaving the outskirts of Vienna the Turks burnt what they could not remove, slaughtered their Christian prisoners or threw them living into the flames, and went away into the East, leaving desolation in their wake.
Solyman’s pride was deeply wounded by the rebuff before Vienna, and even the conquest of a large part of Armenia, of Mesopotamia, and Bagdad failed to comfort him, so he readily took the excuse of interfering with the West again when Zapolya died, and the question of Hungarian succession rearose. Throughout the war the Turkish arms, though worsted now and then, prevailed over the Western armies, and Austria was forced to enter into a treaty with the Porte and to pay tribute, while nearly all Hungary and Transylvania came under Turkish domination. To all these successes came the victories won by Solyman’s admiral, Khairreddin-Barbarossa, in the Mediterranean Sea. He defeated the Spaniards and drove the Arab pirates (himself a former pirate) of the north of Africa back to their hiding-places, sought them out there and made them subjects of the Sultan. He pillaged the coast of the Adriatic and sacked Italian towns, and with inferior numbers defeated the naval forces of the Pope, Venice, and the Emperor off Prevesa in 1538.
Solyman went out to meet Khairreddin’s successor, Pialé, a Croat by birth, when the latter made his triumphal entry into the Golden Horn, but the Sultan’s brow was clouded, for trouble had sought him out. Within the Seraglio walls, in the halls of Solyman the Magnificent, stalked Tragedy, called in by Jealousy. A fair Russian girl had captured the Sultan’s heart, Sultana Roxalana, or Khourrem (the Joyous One), as the Turks called her, and her ambitions for Selim, her son, led her to fill her husband’s mind with suspicion. Mustapha, his elder son by a Circassian, a handsome youth and highly gifted, Governor of Carmania, was accused of plotting against his father. Mustapha was ordered to enter the Sultan’s presence alone, and Solyman, looking on from an inner chamber, saw seven mute executioners carry out his command to strangle his son with the bowstring. Thus the sword of Othman, the mantle of the Prophet, came to the son of Roxalana, to Selim the Sot.
Solyman died while conducting the siege of Szigath, on the night before the gallant defender of that place, Zriny, fell in a desperate last sortie. The news of his death was kept from his army till it had returned to the neighbourhood of Belgrade. Here, on the outskirts of a dense forest, when the setting sun threw long shadows out towards the east, the imams announced the Sultan’s death, and great wailings of lamentation re-echoed among the giant trees and set the leaves trembling in sympathy with an Empire’s grief. Solyman was buried near the mosque he built, round which to-day refugees, sick and wounded soldiers from the battlefields, are gathered together, patient sons of Islam awaiting their fate.