... ambitious and original ... This is history, but not as we know it. It is non-fiction posing as a novel, rich in incident and cinematic detail, not so much fly on the wall as prowling vizier in the hall — almost exclusively in the present tense. It’s tremendous ... From this vivid, elaborately illustrated set piece, de Bellaigue whisks his readers masterfully across the continents, from the Doge’s Palace in Venice to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, via bloody battlefields in the Balkans and north Africa, piratical manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, courtly intrigues and life-and-death struggles in the royal harem ... Readers used to de Bellaigue’s elegant prose will find much to admire in these pages. His command of his main characters and his grip of the wider history in which they wage their wars and plot their rivals’ demise is never less than sure-footed. A new departure is a conversational style that revels in the vernacular ... It’s a sign of how thoroughly gripping this book is that I found myself wanting a second volume as soon as possible.

The finest historical fiction renders the strange grippingly familiar; so too do those rare historians whose novelistic understanding of their subject brings it to life. Christopher de Bellaigue, an acclaimed historian of the Middle East, has done just this in The Lion House, a vivid, cinematic account of the rise of Suleyman the Magnificent that is written almost entirely in the present tense ... De Bellaigue follows with exhilarating clarity and suspense the era’s broader battles across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and the individual trajectories—grand ambitions, rivalries, betrayals—of these outsiders in Suleyman’s court, a place rife with intrigue and back-stabbing, rich with colorful characters, each pressing their advantage.

It is all written in the present tense. This creates the obvious sense of liveliness and urgency as well as dissipating a little the slightly dead feeling the reader can experience with historical narratives, that you already know the end before you begin and there is nothing to play for. That urgency can come at a cost to your trust in the historicity of the writing and would be tricky to sustain, but shorn of index and notes, The Lion House is less than 250 pages long and Bellaigue, whose previous books include The Islamic Enlightenment, sets about the task with such confidence and skill that it works ... It’s an apt title for a dazzling and dark work. Witty and often wise, it speaks to the frailties and the precarity of power. It offers advice that is timelessly appropriate.

... although we know how the story ends, this account really grips. And it does so by bringing out the fascinating individuals, the adventure, the lurid details, the barbarities, the opulence and squalor and near misses of the story ... There are some insanely annoying aspects to De Bellaigue’s writing. He employs the historic present. His style is sometimes wince-makingly demotic...Yet for all that, you really want to read on ... I’m hoping there’s another to come.

Neither exactly a novel nor exactly a history, it is a hard-to-classify book that assembles the known facts about the period and grouts them together with brisk and muscular prose. The method falls somewhere between mosaic, archaeology and taxidermy. Written in a sure-footed historical present, the book creates a simulacrum of the 16th century through the painstaking accumulation of attested details. Its set pieces depict sieges, naval battles, high-stakes diplomatic negotiations and the opulence of the Venetian and Ottoman courts. Above all, it revels in the display of power through money and fine objects ... The book’s scope is so sweeping that it’s sometimes hard to discern its focus ... gives new meaning to the phrase 'omniscient narration.' Endnotes for each chapter supply sources for the most recondite facts. I found myself flipping to the endnotes with a deepening sense of admiration for de Bellaigue’s scholarship ... This appetite for detail gives the book its vividness and energy. Its bracing prose mixes registers between formal and slangy ... De Bellaigue relishes luxury, spectacle and precise vocabulary. He writes with supreme confidence about power, diplomacy, clothing, avarice, war, statecraft and the exceptional brutality of the era. He has also unearthed an eyewitness account of the Venetian Alvise Gritti’s desperate final bid in 1534 to win back his declining influence by switching allegiances to the sultan’s enemies and plotting to seize Hungary. Written by the manager of Gritti’s household, a man called Francesco Della Valle, this source supplies the book with its gripping, novelistic climax ... While The Lion House unfolds like a novel, through scenes rich with authenticating detail and even a sprinkling of dialogue, the extensive notes suggest that at least in its presentation of the major facts his narrative is true to the historical record. Yet I would still hesitate to file the book under nonfiction. The Lion House is apparently slavish to a certain notion of accuracy, but it doesn’t include an evaluation of its sources. Questions of historiography are not raised. And its bold declarative (and decidedly contemporary) sentences are very far from the tentative formulations of conventional history ... De Bellaigue is limited on one hand by his desire to present only what’s already been spotted by the telescopes of history. But he is especially attuned to diplomacy, war and statecraft, and just not as interested in exploring the more intimate aspects of existence ... The book’s well-informed cerebral voice has much to say about these logistical matters, but remains silent on more pertinent mysteries, like the bond between Suleiman and Ibrahim. This, a key to the events in the book, is clearly strong and apparently sexual in origin. But it is never given elaboration. A novelist might dramatize it; a historian would at least speculate about it. This book does neither. The narrator of The Lion House can’t offer us the inner worlds of its characters and chooses not to share his own ... In the end, despite the book’s bravura expertise, there is something wearying about its procession of power, status, wealth and conquest. If we are being watched by alien observers, one hopes they have more pity for us and more curiosity about our inner lives than this. Deprived of the license to invent and lacking the desire to enter another consciousness, The Lion House feels like a series of tableaus, seen from a great distance. As the lives of its human characters unfold, they remain too far away for us to share either their screams or their laughter.

From time to time, cinematically vivid tableaux halt its (literally) breakneck political intrigues. Each spangled scene...rests on a solid foundation in the primary sources — letters, journals, diplomatic reports — cited at the end ... behind the bejewelled descriptive prose a thumping pulse of action tugs us through Suleyman’s victories on land, the gory stalemate in Hungary that thwarted both crescent and cross, and into the pirate empire of the waves built up by the russet-bearded admiral Hayreddin, aka Barbarossa, from Lesbos ... races over a vast geostrategic canvas at high speed. Its swirling dust-cloud of gambits, reversals and treacheries can sometimes block a wider view. Still, de Bellaigue’s glittering, deft and often witty prose adds pleasure to each page, though his flair for the demotic comedown may be an acquired taste. Given the rhetorical splendour on show elsewhere, it’s almost as if Sir Walter Scott had suddenly yielded to Blackadder.

The book does not pretend to be a scholarly biography, though de Bellaigue has read many sources and modern works, including ones in Turkish and Persian. Instead it offers a vivid presentation of events, reimagined as scenes and episodes, and structured on the interactions between a group of key characters. The model is more dramatic than historical and just as we watch actors performing in real time, so this book is written in a continuous present tense ... Vividness is something de Bellaigue does best. To call his writing novelistic is a plain statement of fact, not a reproach ... This author’s delight in detail goes beyond the ordinary techniques of exoticism, though one of them, list-making, may be slightly over-worked ... As a stylistic exercise this is quite unusual, and the main question it raises in the reader’s mind is about the authorial voice, which exercises its own imperial power over the story. Sometimes it lays down splendid aphorisms ... What is missing here – by choice, not inadvertently – is the real key to historical writing: a sense of uncertainty. Historians make imperfect judgements about incomplete evidence, and some of what they write about (above all, human intentions) may have been intrinsically uncertain at the time. Babinger’s hesitant suggestions about the character of Mehmed are more valuable, as history, than de Bellaigue’s fluent ventriloquizing of Süleyman. That is not to say, however, that the pleasures of this book are merely superficial ones – they are strong and genuine pleasures, but of a different, literary kind.

Around the silent sovereign revolves a constellation of colorful personalities. They are impulsive, talkative, intriguers, rebels. Bellaigue brings them to life by using the archives of the Serenissima, Venice, whose diplomats were as eager to impress their readers as modern journalists publishing clickbait, reporting gory executions and gorgeous receptions ... Bellaigue’s storytelling is an antidote to histories that follow too doggedly a central theme. His history does not move forward like a river rushing out of the Alps, but meanders and eddies across a flat plain. Sometimes his waters are muddy indeed, as when he explains the obscure intrigues of Hungarian politics. The current that moves the reader forward is a meditation on power, trust, envy. Suleyman frequently consults the 11th-century statesman Nizam ul-Mulk on how princes should behave to keep their thrones, an art in which he is ultimately successful. Aspiring alpha males and females would do well to keep the Nizam’s or Bellaigue’s books on their bedside tables.