As the 139 episodes of the television series The Magnificent Century prove, the reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman I (1520–66) remains popular today. In his new book The Lion House: The Coming of a King, Christopher de Bellaigue serves up the intrigue, brutality, and opulence of the first fifteen years of Suleiman’s reign in a format that is not quite history but not quite fiction. The narrative, like the historical sources on which it relies, moves rapidly between scenes. Yet de Bellaigue artfully decorates those scenes with his impressive knowledge of the cultures and customs of the time. The result is a fascinating study that transports the reader to the age of this magnificent sultan.

Although Suleiman is the book’s touchstone, he is not really its subject. Instead, the “persons of the drama” are presented in successive acts. Act I, for example, introduces Ibrahim of Parga, the boyhood friend of Suleiman who becomes the monarch’s increasingly powerful Grand Vizier. Although a slave taken from Christian parents, Ibrahim Pasha rises to become almost the equal of the sultan himself. De Bellaigue strongly intimates that Suleiman and Ibrahim were lovers, presumably because there are references to them sleeping in the same bed. Interpretations like this have become common in a world where sharing a bed without sexual activity is considered bizarre. That was, however, not the case in the sixteenth century. Nor does a sexual relationship between the sultan and his vizier quite fit with their Islamic