Suleiman the Magnificent's tomb believed to have been found in Hungary | Hacker News Reader

Suleiman the Magnificent's tomb believed to have been found in Hungary

theguardian.com

63 pointsdiodorus48 comments

He is the only Sultan who has ever got married. His wife, Roxelana, is a legendary figure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxelana). Being one of the girls in the harem, this Ukrainian girl completely captivated Suleiman's heart, took over him, and convinced him to get married. She was a de facto ruler (at least a major player) of the Ottoman Empire while he was on conquests and even when he was in Constantinople. The other interesting thing about Roxelana is that pretty much all her descendants, future sultans, were either degenerates or feeble minded, which historians think contributed to the decline of the Ottoman empire.

Of note, Roxelana was originally a sex slave, of the sort ISIL is noted for today: born a Christian, she was captured by Crimean Tatars and added to the sultan's harem. It was only when he fell in love with her that he freed and married her.

How do you mean by "He is the only Sultan who has ever got married"? The other Sultans don't get married?

In Ottoman empire the Sultans do not get married, I think it was forbidden. They have Harem, the women are concubines.

The story is that Roxelana (aka Hürrem Sultan) got herself freed and when Süleyman wants her, refuses and tells him "he needs to marry her" since she is not a slave anymore. She was only woman marring a sultan.

His was interesting fact for me also, because it means all sultans are kinda bastards. But a little research shows that children are not considered bastards. Also from religion point of view.

If i remember correctly this was a rule that was politically motivated to keep the polical power concentrated within the family.

> Historians believe Suleiman’s heart and internal organs were buried in the tomb and his body taken back to Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known. His death at Szigetvar was kept secret for 48 days to prevent his troops from giving up the fight.

I was wondering how the tomb of the most famous sultan could have possibly gotten itself lost. The answer is it's only sort of his tomb.

World history class taught us that Suleiman's domestic policy was what made him legendary. Much later I learned that he almost took Vienna - essentially the high water mark of the Ottomans. Imagine what the world would have been like if he succeeded...

Story goes that's how we got croissants and coffee. Croissants as a nod to Viennese victory over the Ottoman siege in 17th century (crescent shape), and coffee apparently became popular in Europe because of that same Ottoman siege.

Them's the legends at least.

All I know about that part of history is that the Hapsburg empire used Slovenia as a buffer zone between them and the turks. Now my country has a lot of very fortified churches because the peasants had to hide somewhere while the Turks raided.

Interestingly, this also goes toward explaining the attitude of many south-eastern European countries toward the current immigration waves.

Most countries in the Balkans (not just Slovenia) have fought the Turks for extended periods of time. For example, in Romania, Stephen the Great had a habit of celebrating victories over the Ottomans by building new churches and monasteries [1]. These still form the country's landmarks and pilgrimage points today, and Stephen is a celebrated hero.

Basically many nations have linked their national identities to resisting waves of the "Musulman". It's hard to rewrite peoples' roots and archetypes at the strike of a politician's pen now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_churches_established_b...

It's even worse than you think. The last wars we had about Christian vs. Muslim were in the 90's and led to NATO bombing the hell out of the Balkans.

People are still sore about that. I have friends who remember hiding from NATO bombs.

Innocent people must have been killed, it was a war. I remember the US accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy. What the US was trying to do was stop the genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Genocide

> the US was trying to do was stop the genocide

That's just how the West media presented the events at that time. In reality, the event you link to happened after the more years of war, where the victims of the mass-murder event renamed as genocide were the side which the US actively supported (Bosnian Muslims), and which had their own "kind-of-ISIS" fighters and committed enough atrocities before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_mujahideen

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33345618

The US supported these Muslims the same way they supported Mujaheddin in Afghanistan before

http://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-...

and just how they effectively supported Al-Qaeda and other extremists in Libya later, or all the Islamic extremist "rebels" in Syria.

The US has a long history of using the Muslim fanatics to destroy the countries the leaders of which it doesn't favor, like Assad's now.

The Yugoslavia events were of course with more actors just like in today's Syria it's not just Assad and ISIS.

The basis of US foreign policy is the commitment to prevent the rise of powers capable of constraining Washington’s unilateral action. Washington is not opposed to terrorism. Washington has been purposely creating terrorism for many years. Weakening Russia is one of the decades-long tasks, read honest Brzezinski in the article from 1998 I've linked.

The documentary "Dossier Srebrenica" is a must see with regards to the Balkan war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xwtny39iMs

The more recent videos of ISIS beheadings give a lot of more context to this video from that time and place (early 1990 in Bosnia):

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/189425.php

"Muslim 'El Mujahadid' Behead Serb, Play Soccer With Head"

There's also a Norwegian documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnALEecbZ-k

"The internationally accepted viewpoint is very black-and-white and ultimately labels the Serbs as evil monsters while ignoring the crimes committed by the Muslims which was what "the Srebrenica Massacre" might have been a direct consequence of."

also note

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_mujahideen

"if you look at the 9/11 hijackers, several of those hijackers were trained or fought in Bosnia."

One "moderate" "rebel" "on our side" (the interview with Osama Bin Laden, The Independent, 1993):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQis_b5WEAAU_74.jpg

I believe we had to experience the raise of ISIS to understand the scale and the seriousness of all that.

They bombed Serbia in 1999 as well. That was supposedly about Kosovo, but they were bombing cities that weren't in Kosovo and didn't have military infrastructure to "destroy economy and infrastructure". It was kind of a dick move really. Serbian economy already wasn't much back then.

Kosovo being a majority muslim state within orthodox Serbia. Afaik their independence/sovereignty is still questionable so the NATO bombings didn't really do much.

No, it was not an accident. Serbia shot down an F-117. The downed stealth bomber was sold to the Chinese and it was stored in the embassy. CIA wanted to destroy the wreck, but it was in an other part of the building. This story makes sense because China started developing a stealth plane right after this Kosovo war (Chengdu J-20).

> People are still sore about that.

Vladimir Putin's whole foreign policy relates to these events... It's the reason he intervened in Georgia (remember that?), Ukraine, and now Syria.

It's a pretext, not the reason.

> People are still sore about that. I have friends who remember hiding from NATO bombs.

"Death From Above" in Party Animals (2005) by Turbonegro.

>Most countries in the Balkans (not just Slovenia) have fought the Turks for extended periods of time.

Count Dracula - Vlad the Impaler - comes immediately to mind. I'm always surprised at the similarity between how Dracula and Milosevic were both demonized for defending their people against the "Musulman" aggression.

The Schwarzenberg aristocratic family has an interesting coat of arms - http://www.almanachdegotha.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilde...

A crow eating an eye out of a decapitated turkish head. They got it as a reward for helping defeat the Turks at Vienna. Quite a gruesome image. And they were very proud of it, Hluboka castle (re)built in 19th century has these as door handles https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/3a/15/ae/3a15aef5d...

Maybe it's bagels not croissants?

Let me guess, the next sultan's tomb would have been found near Nuremberg.

I've just spent a test run trying to think of a great conqueror who kept the gains, and couldn't. Some of them lost most of the gains in their lifetimes, in other cases it was lost shortly after their deaths, or disintegrated.

Genghis Khan? Charlemagne, arguably..? Maybe one of the Qin emperors... yeah, there aren't many great military conquerors whose gains lasted.

Start digging in the arts and philosophy though, and there are plenty, after a fashion.

Julius Caesar and Augustus? Those conquests lasted for a few centuries.

Napples and Sicily also have been part of the Spanish crown for centuries.

The Spanish kings held half of South America for centuries.

Yes, South America is much bigger than Spain itself, was conquered quickly and then kept... good point. Thanks.

Didn't Ghengis Khan's realm contract and then split when he died? IIRC Charlemagne gained two thrones (not by conquest), then added to that area by conquest, and largely kept the military gains.

Mehmed II? In any case a lot of the territory Suleiman conquered did remain part of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th century.

Probably would have been a lot more Jews alive in Europe for starters.

Edit: People seem to be unhappy with this comment. Rather than vote on it, why not comment on it.

You should have justification.

Looking at Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ott..., it seems like Jews were at the whim of the Sultan, but during the "classic" Ottoman Empire (1300-1600s), tended to prosper.

There may be counters to this, but first couple of sources I looked at indicate your initial comment either needs backing or is incorrect.

Arab-Jew conflict like we have today is a relatively modern thing, starting around the turn of the 19th century and intensifying during WW2 for a variety of reasons, including oil politics for Hitler and increasing land / nationalism tensions.

An interesting book about this and Iraq in specific is Banking on Baghdad; published in 2008, it's aimed at an interested Western reader, and is a good read.

Thanks for this reccomendation, it's in my queue now :)

Probably the lot of Jews under Christian Europe at the time was not much better (maybe even worse) than under the Ottomans.

Why not justify it?

He rebuilt the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walls_of_Jerusalem

These walls are of Jerusalem Stone and are very impressive and thick as are the gates.

There are hardly any ideological differences between this celebrated sultan and the ISIS (Daesh) religious leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their ambitions are also largely identical.

Incidentally, Russia freed my country (Bulgaria) from the oppression of the Turkish (aka Ottoman) empire 300 years ago. Today, Russia again seems to be the only country with the will AND capability to fight ISIS (Daesh).

I still haven't quite forgiven Putin for the Russo-Georgian War, but the Russo-Georgian War was a fair sight less bad than how the Turks and Persians treated Georgia; and you're right about the Turks and ISIS.

Historians in the English-speaking world have a habit of gushing about the early Islamic caliphate, the Umayyads in al-Andalus, and the Ottoman Turks. (Indeed, Carly Fiorina regards the Ottomans as "the greatest in the world" -- http://www.examiner.com/article/fiorina-sings-the-praises-of... .) The fashion for this began with Jewish Orientalism in the 19th century, and with the point that the Umayyads in particular were pretty tolerant of the Jews; but this obscures the fact that the Ottomans and the others were _vile_ -- routinely impaling and crucifying, and slave-trading (for both sexual and other purposes) on a really enormous scale.

If 300,000 slaves imported mean that the American South was indefensible, what does that make the Ottomans, who practically depopulated the Caucasus because Caucasian men were brave and Caucasian women were beautiful? (And this is without even mentioning their similar depredations in the Balkans, and in Africa.)

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714844 and marked it off-topic.

In fact, christians also raided muslim lands and sold the victims as slaves. Everybody did this.

You can read, for example, David Abulafia's history of the Mediterranean.

you are probably being downvoted for these

> That's why there is to this day an almost inconceivable hatred in eastern Europe towards Muslims.

> You can see it for example in the refusal of all eastern European countries (in the EU) to take even a single refugee from Syria. If the EU tried to force them they would likely leave the EU over this.

which are neither historic, nor facts.

>which are neither historic, nor facts Your opinion, like his opinion might be too categorical and with too little argumentation. The way I perceived the feelings of the eastern europe towards muslims (non-arabs, arabs and turks - very little differentiating between these sorts of muslims): "we don't hate them, but we strongly prefer not having muslim enclaves in our countries like they have in the western europe". Everybody in EE heard about the inconveniences experienced by france, belgium and netherlands due to their incapacity to assimilate the immigrants and no one in EE knows what are the advantages of immigration especially from third world countries. EE simply does not want to make the same immigration/multi-culti experiments that western europe made. There is little hate and no historic hate against muslims when it comes to accepting or rejecting these immigrants but if you think there is no historic hate towards turks in eastern europe, I think you don't search deep enough (it's right after the latent hate against russian domination, which is more recent).

If GP had stated "there is long standing diffidence" rather than "almost inconceivable hatred" then it would have been less arguable.

As is stated, I really can't see how you can read that as a statement of fact.

The second statement

> You can see it for example in the refusal of all eastern European countries (in the EU) to take even a single refugee from Syria.

is factually non true. And

> If the EU tried to force them they would likely leave the EU over this.

is a random made up hypothesis.

Eastern Europe isn't very interested in Muslim immigration, and I can't blame them if we look at the integration problems we face with Muslims in Western Europe. [0][1].

Also, remember that the Balkan countries has had much tensions between Muslim populations and others in the past. Many non-Muslims in these countries share the same feelings [2].

I believe immigration without integration (which is happening in Western Europe) might eventually cause a civil war; it's already breaking down the social cohesion in Western European countries. At the same time the large amount of immigrants, who tend to make heavily use of social benefits and healthcare without providing much economic benefits, will destroy the welfare state [3] (Dutch article).

I know I'm not voicing a popular opinion (yet!), but I believe it's the truth and therefore needs to be said.

By the way, I should note I have no problem with hard working immigrants that want to contribute to society and make an effort to integrate. For example, I have huge respect for the Polish workers that have come to The Netherlands to work in the greenhouses for a minimum wage. These people work hard and don't appear much in criminal statistics. They also tend to learn Dutch and because of the shared cultural background they integrate much easier.

I will personally try to help a Thai lady who also made a big effort in learning the Dutch language and adopting Dutch culture. Sadly she works for very little money and most of what she makes, she tries to send to her family (parents, son, grandson) in Thailand. But I have a huge respect for her and hopefully I can help her have an easier live in The Netherlands.

---

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/europe/eastern-europ...

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/europe/despite-shrin...

[2]: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/20/refugee...

[3]: http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4504/Economie/article/detail/41637...

Your opinion might not be popular in general, but I don't see how immigration can be feasible/sustainable without integration. Surely it's beneficial for both parties that immigrants try to integrate. I realise some of these people end up in Western Europe out of necessity rather than choice, but more should be done to integrate them.

He was great in Civ

Oh noes, is this going to be Turkish sovereign territory too like the "tomb" in Syria?

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