Editorial
Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend
A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.
Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.