As he watched the guard change stations,
he remembered that victory on the Mohács Plain, and why it had been important for another reason.
Just before he'd gone on campaign,
an envoy had arrived at his court from the queen mother of France.
The envoy had dropped to a knee before him and begged him to attack Charles, that Spanish prince,
so that he would release her prince, the King of France, who Charles had captured in one of their wars over Italy.
This had pleased Suleiman.
He had already planned his campaign toward the Mohács. He would fulfill this request without actually changing plans.
But there was more than that.
This was his road into the circles of European diplomacy.
His predecessors had only ever been adversaries to the European world.
But he knew that if he was ever to have his European empire, he would need allies there.
And this was his route to them.
But the next major envoy to him after the battle of Mohács was not one of friendship.
It was from Ferdinand, that other Habsburg who Charles had given his Austrian lands to so that he could concentrate on his Spanish holdings.
As soon as Ottoman forces had pulled back from Hungary, Ferdinand had swept in.
The envoys were there to assert Ferdinand's claim to the region.
They were masked as overtures of peace,
They were masked as overtures of peace, but the discussion was a
They were masked as overtures of peace, but the discussion was a disaster.
The Habsburg envoys asked for all the fortified parts of Hungary to be handed over in exchange for peace,
and Ibrahim responded, "why not ask for Istanbul as well?"
It wasn't really going well.
Needless to say, no agreement was reached, and shortly thereafter
Ferdinand declared himself King of Hungary, while the Hungarians themselves elected a local noble named John Zápolya to be their king.
Suleiman would have to head back to Hungary to re-establish control.
This time there would be no stopping.
He would head all the way to Vienna, that great Habsburg stronghold in the east.
He once again raised the horsetail banners and summoned the endless legions of his empire.
A hundred thousand strong, they would march back into Europe.
He would serve as a supreme commander with Ibrahim at his side.
On the 10th of May, 1592, they departed for their grand campaign.
But again, weather plagued them.
Rain poured unceasingly.
His camels faltered, his men fell ill.
His great cannon would get mired in the road,
and even with hundreds of men and dozens of beasts trying to move them, in the end, they had to be abandoned.
It wasn't until the 18th of August that he once again reached the Mohács Plain, where he was met by the upstart prince Zápolya.
But here at least, things began well.
Zápolya paid him homage and joined his forces to that of the empire, helping to retake nearby fortresses.
He was glad to accept the suzerainty of Suleiman for help against Ferdinand.
The ambassador for the King of France had also arrived with
40,000 crowns to support Zápolya and his attempt to wrest Hungary from the Habsburgs.
Together they all traveled to Buda, which Ferdinand had occupied in the absence of Ottoman forces
The siege lasted only six days.
The Janissaries carried the town by storm
Suleiman forbade the town from being sacked, as the Hungarians were now his subjects.
But that didn't stop his men from taking many slaves, and though they mostly left the Hungarians alone,
it didn't prevent them from separating as many Austrian heads as they could from their Austrian necks.
Soon, Zápolya was installed as ruler there, and Suleiman's men could march for their real objective:
Vienna, the seat of Ferdinand himself.
By the 27th of September, they reached the walls of the Habsburg town.
Within stood twenty thousand defenders against his more than a hundred thousand men under arms.
The 72 Habsburg cannons would have to match against his 300.
Even Ferdinand had abandoned his capital and fled to Bohemia.
Victory looked inevitable.
This time though, the Ottoman threat was all too real for the rest of the Holy Roman Empire to ignore.
Charles had sent skilled mercenaries to aid his brother, and even the
Protestants were willing to make common cause with their Catholic foes to hold off the Muslim Turks.
And the rains had cost him.
The Austrians had taken the time to prepare the capital for war.
The stores were replenished, the walls were repaired and restored,
even the houses outside the walls had been demolished to keep them from being of use to the besieging army.
The gates were blocked, and firefighting supplies had been prepared.
There would be no immediate surrender to the overwhelming army of the Porte.
It would be a contest of will and arms.
And the cannons began to sing.
He watched from his tent on the hill as his men assailed the walls in waves.
The thousand different costumes of the different ranks making a glorious display against the cold stone of the Viennese walls.
Waves would crash and break against that gray shore,
always so close to overwhelming the Austrian land,
only to pull back out to sea again
Sappers mined the walls,
a foolish sortie was broken,
and the heads of the reckless Austrians were displayed before the very gates to let them know of the fate that awaited them,
to remind them of the hopelessness of their stand.
He promised his men great rewards for assaulting the town, with a king's ransom for the first man to get over the wall.
And on the 14th of October,
his men assailed the walls with the fury of men possessed.
They threw themselves upon a breach made by his sappers,
carving through the defenders with their vicious curved blades.
Inch by inch they hewed their way forward, nearing the crest of the breach.
Then, collapse.
The very flower of the Turkish infantry had broken upon the rocks of Vienna.
And it began to snow.
Suleiman knew it was the end.
He paid his men as if it had been a victory, and gave his commanders all victory gifts.
He had it proclaimed that he had merely wished to meet Charles and Ferdinand in battle,
and that it had never been his intention to capture Vienna.
So to spare both his men and the Austrians the privations of a siege, he would happily withdraw.
But in his heart of hearts, he knew this would be the farthest they would ever go.
Not just him or his army, but his empire.
He could feel it in his bones.
To the world and to himself, he smiled and laughed off this one minor setback
to the power of the greatest nation in the world.
But deep within, he could feel an end surrounding him in the snowy fields of Vienna.
As they withdrew, at Buda, Zápolya kissed his ring and congratulated him on a successful campaign.
But the entire way, the Austrians harassed his retreating columns,
and the weather was cruel company,
slowing their march, bringing frostbite and disease,
but even as his men fell, his mind was on another sort of ending.
For generations, it had been the law of the empire
that, upon ascension of a new Sultan,
all of the Sultan's brothers who yet lived would be put to death to prevent civil war.
Were he to die, his sons would have to fight for the throne.
The lives of those who lost would be forfeit,
even if they survived the struggle.
He loved his sons too much, even Mustafa, with whom he struggled at times, to allow that to happen.
And what of his love, Roxelana?
His heart ached at the thought of her bereft of her sons,
but he knew they would lose.
Mustafa was his eldest, born to his first wife.
He was loved by the people
and the army.
He was also the most able of his children.
He was the clear choice for the future of the empire.
But his rise would mean the murder of the children of the one Suleiman loved the most.
On the long road to Istanbul,
Suleiman could find no solution.
He could only feel the vice of his choice closing around him.
He could feel the salt trace down his cheek in the warm breeze that blew over the Bosphorus.
How had he let it all go so wrong?
He knew as he walked the palace grounds that, in the thoughts of the past, he would not find peace.
And yet, what else was left to an old man?
He wondered if that Roman emperor ever shared such thoughts near the end.
What he wouldn't give to talk to a man who might understand.
But they were all dead now, and he was alone; and even that thought brought other memories.