The reign of Suleiman I is often seen as the start of the final decline of the Safavid realm. According to the modern historian Rudi Matthee, Suleiman was what the British historian Hugh Kennedy calls an "internal absentee" (in reference to the tenth-century Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir), a ruler who "had no real appreciation of the constraints and limitations of the financial resources". He was a king who never reached “political adulthood” and was considered a weak and cruel ruler whose indifference and debauchery influenced the decline of the state of his realm. Jonas Hanway, who visited Iran decades after the Siege of Isfahan, calls Suleiman's reign "remarkable for nothing but a slavish indolence, a savage and inhuman cruelty." Modern historians who unanimously see him as a failed king.; According to Hans Robert Roemer, the only redeeming aspect of Suleiman's personality and regnant was his patronage of arts.
