by Mór Jókai
CHAPTER XI
THE FLOWERS OF THE GARDEN OF BEGTASH
At the end of the fifteenth century, when the Turkish crescent had wonan abiding-place among the constellations of Europe, there dwelt inthe Turkish dominions a worthy dervish, Haji Begtash by name.
As the overflowing armies of the newly founded empire submerged thesurrounding Christian kingdoms, Haji Begtash went everywhere with theconquering hosts, but in the intervals of peace he begged his wayabout the empire, and scraped together a little money from the Turkishgrandees or from the extravagant, booty-laden Turkish soldiers.
Now wherefore did this worthy dervish make it a point to collect somuch money and wear himself out by travelling from the Adriatic to theEuxine, when he might have sat all day long at the gate of the Kaaba,as they call the stone on the tomb of the Prophet, and recited fromhis long bead-string the nine properties of Allah (no very exhaustinglabor, by-the-way), and received therefor, from the pilgrims to theshrine, meat, drink, and abundance of alms?
Well, Haji Begtash had taken up a great work. When he accompanied theTurkish armies, and they, on entering a Christian village, began tocut down the inhabitants and tie the captives together with ropes,the dervish would force his way through the bloodthirsty soldiery, andif he beheld any wild Bashkir or Kurdish desperado about to dash outthe brains of a forsaken, weeping orphan child against a wall, hewould lay his hand upon them, take away the child, cover it with hismantle, caress it, and take it away with him. And thus he would keepon doing till he had with him a whole group of children, all of whomwere concealed beneath the folds of his ample cloak, where nobodycould hurt them; nay, frequently he would carry babies inswaddling-clothes in his bosom, till people began to wonder what onearth he meant to do with them.
Subsequently he announced that any captive who brought him hischildren should receive a silver denarius per head for each one ofthem. This was not much, it is true; but then there was little demandfor children. In the slave-market only the adult human animal had itsprice-current. And so it came about that innumerable children werebrought to the worthy dervish.
He took them away with him to a mosque at Adrianople. Folks laughed athim, and asked him mockingly if he was going to plant a garden withthem.
Haji Begtash accepted the jest in real earnest, and called hischildren the flowers of Begtash's garden; and this name they preservedin the coming centuries.
These saplings (amongst them were some of the loveliest littlecreatures of six and seven years of age) were brought up by theindefatigable Haji year after year. He instructed them in the Kuran;he told them everything concerning the innumerable and ineffable joyswhich the Prophet promises to those who fall in the defence of thetrue Faith; and at the same time accustomed them to endure all thehardships and privations of this earthly life.
Most of these children had never known father or mother, and those whohad quickly forgot all about them as they grew up. No love of home orkindred bound them to this world, and therefore they were all the moreattached to one another. Their comrades were the only beings theylearned to love, and every one of them treated old Begtash as afather. His words were sacred to them.
Their days were passed in hard work, in perpetual martial exercises,fighting, and swimming. A youth of twelve among them was capable ofcoping with full-grown men elsewhere, and each one of them at maturitywas a veritable Samson.
In those days the Ottoman armies suffered many defeats from theChristian arms. Their strength lay for the most part in their cavalry,but their innumerable infantry was a mere mob, two of theirfoot-soldiers not being equal to one of the well-disciplined Europeanmen-at-arms who advanced irresistibly against them in huge compactmasses; and they were of no use at all in sieges, except to fill upthe ditches and trenches with their dead bodies, and thus make a roadfor the more valiant warriors that came after them.
And now, as if by magic, a little band of infantry suddenly appearedon the theatre of the war. These new soldiers were dressed quitedifferently from the others. On their heads they wore a high hatbulging outward in front, with a black, floating cock's plume on thetop of it; their dolmans were of embroidered blue cloth; their hoseonly reached down to their knees, below that the whole leg was bare;their only weapon was a short, broad, roundish sword, in markedcontrast to the other Turkish soldiers, who loaded themselves with asmany weapons as if they were going to fight with ten hands.
None recognized the youths--and youths they all were. They did notmingle with the other squadrons, nor place themselves under anycaptain, nor did they ask for pay from any one.
But in the very first engagement they showed what they were made of. Afortress had to be besieged which was defended in front by a broadstream of water. The strange youths clinched their broad swordsbetween their teeth, swam across the water, scaled the bastions amidstfire and flames, and planted the first horse-tail crescent on thetower.
These were the flowers of Begtash's garden.
The first battle established the fame of the youthful band that hadbeen brought up by the old dervish, and by the time the secondcampaign began, Haji Begtash was already the chief of innumerablemonasteries whose inmates were called the Brethren of the Order ofBegtash. Consisting, as they did, of captive Christian children, andstanding under the immediate command of the Sultan, they composed anew army of infantry, the fame of whose valor filled the whole world.
These were the "jeni-cheri" (new soldiers), which name wassubsequently altered into Janichary or Janissary. But for long ages tocome, if any Janissary warrior had a mind to speak haughtily, he wouldcall himself "a flower from Begtash's garden."
Many a glorious name bloomed in this garden in the course of the ages.The power of the Sultan rested on their shoulders, and if they shookthe Sultan from off their shoulders, down he had to go.
If they were powerful servants, they were also powerful tyrants. Theirvalor often reaped a harvest of victories, but their obstinacy againand again imperilled their triumphs. With the increase of their powertheir self-assurance increased likewise. It was not so much theSultans and Viziers who commanded them as they who commanded theSultans and Viziers. And if the rebellious Janissaries hoisted on theAtmeidan a kettle, the signal of revolt, it was always with fear andtrembling that the Seraglio asked them what were their demands; andthe whole Divan breathed more freely when the answer came that it wasgold they wanted, and not blood--the blood of their officers. Andwhen, after the great Feast of Bairam, there was the usualdistribution of pilaf, and the dangerous kettles were filled full withthis savory mess of rice and sheep's flesh, the Sultan, all trembling,would anxiously watch to see how the majestic Janissaries partook oftheir pottage. If they devoured it voraciously, that was a sign oftheir satisfaction; but if they only touched it in a finiking sort ofway, then the Sultan would fly into the Seraglio, and lock himself upamong the damsels of the harem, for it was now certain that theirlordships the Janissaries were displeased, and it was well if theirdispleasure only expressed itself by reducing a whole quarter or so ofthe city to ashes.
Two Sultans had tried to break in two this dangerous double-edgedweapon, which inflicted as many wounds in the heart of the realm asever it dealt outside; but the Janissaries' magic influence was sointerwoven with, so ingrafted in, the mind of the nation that publicfeeling was on their side, and both rulers perished in the boldattempt. They dragged Sultan Osman forth from the Seraglio, and sethim on the back of an ass with his face to its tail, carried him inderision from one end of the town to the other, and then flung himinto the fatal Seven Towers, where the Turkish rulers and theirrelatives are wont to be buried alive and die forgotten. Mahmoud II.'sfather, Selim, on the other hand, expired beneath the sword-thrusts ofthe rebels, and those swords were still sharp and those hands werestill strong when the son of the man whom they had slain sat on thethrone, and under no other Sultan did the throne tremble so much asunder him.
In these days the mighty corps of the Janissaries lived only to commitcrimes or gigantic mistakes; its ancient
glory was not renewed. Duringthe last century their arms had constantly been shattered wheneverthey came into collision with the progressive military science ofEurope. In the course of the ages the flowers in Begtash's garden hadsadly faded. The flowery petals of their glory had fallen from them,and only the thorns remained; and even these were no longer the thornsof the brave thick-set hedge which defends the borders of the gardenagainst would-be invaders, but the stings of the nettle which hurtsthe hand of the gardener as he hoes.
Neither life nor property was any longer safe from them. The Sultanhimself, when he sat upon the throne, was in the most dangerous placeof all, and the Viziers--the chief officials of the realm--trembledevery day for their lives. The turbulence of the Janissaries was aperpetually recurring disease running through all the arteries of therealm, and covering the once mighty empire with poisonous ulcers.
These seditious outbreaks occurred even during the deliberations ofthe Divan, and fear on such occasions was a more urgent counsellorthan conviction to the palace magnates who sat in the cupolaedchamber.
The threats of the Janissaries had compelled Mahmoud to take up armsagainst Ali Pasha; and now, when Ali had kindled the flames of war allover the empire, and the Sultan bade the Janissaries hasten againstthe enemy and subdue him, they replied that they would not fightunless the Sultan led them in person.
Instead of that, they waged war within the very walls of Stambul, forwhenever the news of a defeat reached the capital, the Janissarieswould fall upon the defenceless Greeks and massacre them by thousands.
From distant Asia, from the most savage parts of the empire, Begtash'spriests appeared and proclaimed in the mosques death and destructionon the heads of all the Greeks. It was they who, with torches in theirhands, headed the rush of the fanatical Janissaries against Buyukdere,Pera, and Galata, the quarters of the city where the Greeks resided,and every day they thundered with their bludgeons at the gates of theSeraglio, demanding ever more and more sentences of death against theGreek captives who were shut up in the Seven Towers. The Sultan'sofficials, trembling with fear, wrote out the sentences demanded ofthem, and the victims fell in hundreds; and when the Russianambassador, Stroganov, protested against this butchery, theJanissaries attacked his palace and riddled all the doors and windowswith bullets, which was the subsequent pretext for the long war whichshook the empire to its base, though the Janissaries never lived tofeel it.
Mahmoud watched from the summit of the imperial palace the devastationof Stambul and the devastation of his empire, and he saw no helpanywhere. He saw nothing but the melancholy examples of his ancestorsand the disappearance of his dominions; and as he stroked the head ofhis first-born, Abdul Mejid, a child of nine, he thought to himself,"This lad will not sit on the throne, he will not be a ruler as hisforefathers were; he will not dictate laws to half the world like theother descendants of Omar; but he will be a fugitive on the face ofthe earth, the slave of strange people, as was the fugitive Dzhem,whom they cast forth ages ago."
How miserable was the life of the Sultan! What avails it though anearthly paradise be open to him if life itself be closed against him?What avails it to be a god if he cannot be a man? The Sultan neverknows what it is to have relatives. Very early, while they are stillchildren, the latest born are shut up in the Seven Towers. Thefirst-born son can never meet them, unless it be on the steps of thethrone, when the rebellious Janissaries drag one of them from hisdungeon to raise him to the throne, and lock up the first-born in hisstead. The Sultan cannot be said to possess a wife; all that he hasare favorite concubines, in hundreds, in thousands, as many as hechooses to have, and there is no difference between them exceptdifferences of feminine loveliness and the blind chance which blessessome of them with children. And he makes no more account of one thanhe does of another. Not one of them feels it her duty to love herhusband; it is enough if she be the slave of his desires. If thePadishah be troubled or sorrowful, there is none about him to whom hecan open his heart. He may go from one end of the harem to the other,like one who wanders through a conservatory whose flowers are all sobeautiful, so radiantly smiling; but in vain will he tell them of hisgrief and trouble, for they do not understand him, they do not troubletheir heads about his thoughts; and if, perchance, he tells them thatfrom all four corners of the world mighty foes are marching againstStambul, here and there, perchance, he may hear a sigh of longing fromsome captive maiden, who cannot conceal her secret joy at the thoughtof the happy hour when the hand of deliverance will thunder at theharem door and break its bolts and give freedom, beautiful sunbrightfreedom, to the captives.
It is slavish obsequiousness and nothing else which bends its kneebefore the Padishah; it is fear, not love, which obeys him. And towhom shall he turn when his heart is held fast in the iron grip ofthat numbing sensation which makes the mightiest feel they are butmen--fear?
Mahmoud's sole joy was his nine-year-old son. The child was broughtup by his grandmother, the Sultana Valideh, herself scarce forty yearsof age. This dowager Sultana had civilized, European tastes. She hadbeen educated in France; the young prince was passionately attached toher and she inspired him with all those desires and noble instinctsunder whose influence, thirty years later, new life was to be pouredinto the decrepit Turkish Empire.
The Sultana Valideh wished to so educate her grandson that one day hemight occupy a worthy position among the other rulers of Europe. Shesowed betimes in his heart the seeds of high principles andenlightened tastes, and the Sultan would frequently listen to the wisesentences of his little lad, and, while rocking him on his knee, witha smile upon his face, his heart would beat in an agony of fear, "Whatif anybody got word of this?"
For the old Turkish party lay in wait for every word that fell fromthe Sultan's mouth, and the pointing of the little finger of one ofBegtash's fakirs was more to be feared than the armed hand of the mostvaliant of the Greek heroes. If any one of the Ulemas should chance todiscover that the young heir to the throne listened to any otherbookish lore than what was contained within the covers of the Kuran,which comprised within itself (so they taught) all the wisdom of theworld, they were capable of hounding on the Janissaries against theSeraglio, and slaying both sovereign and child.
The recollection of Achmed Sidi was still fresh in the memory of men.Sidi had been one of the Chief Ulemas, and the Imam of the Mosque ofSophia; and when, a few years ago, the warriors and the diplomatistsof the Tsaritsa Catherine had won victory after victory over theOttomans, not only on every battle-field, but also in every politicalarena, the unfortunate imam advised the Divan that, in view of theindisputable superiority of the Christians, it was necessary to teachthe Turkish diplomatists the Bible, the inference being that just asthe Moslem sages derived all their military science and all theiradministrative wisdom from the Kuran, so also the Christians mustneeds learn all these things from their Bible, thereby tacitlyacknowledging the capacity of the Christians for appropriating allknowledge. But the well-meaning Ulema paid dearly for this goodcounsel. They banished him to the Isle of Chios, and there, for a verytrivial offence, he was first degraded from his office (for it is notlawful to kill a Ulema with weapons), and then handed over to thepasha of the place, who pounded him to death in a stone mortar--adeterrent example for future reformers. Let them beware, therefore, ofmoving a single stone in the ancient fabric of the Ottomanconstitution!