by Will Durant
The Turks were proud of their public baths, and generally considered themselves a more cleanly people than the Christian infidels. Many persons in the upper and middle classes went to a “Turkish bath” twice a week, more of them once a week. There they sat in a steam room until they had sweated abundantly; then an attendant manipulated every joint, massaged the flesh, rubbed it with a coarse cloth, washed it; we do not hear much about arthritis in Turkey. Some other diseases flourished, especially ophthalmia; sand and flies infected the eyes. But the Turks, as we have seen, taught Europe to inoculate for smallpox.
They had no doubt that their civilization excelled that of Christendom. They admitted that slavery was more widespread in Islam, but they saw no real difference between slaves in Turkey and serfs or servants in the Christian world, and Lady Mary and etymology agreed with them. They were as zealous as we in the love and care of flowers; they too, as in Constantinople under Ahmed III (1703-30), had feverish competitions in cultivating tulips; apparently it was the Turks who, through Venice and Vienna and the Netherlands, introduced to Christian Europe the tulip, the Oriental hyacinth, and the garden ranunculus, as well as the chestnut and mimosa trees.10
Art in Turkey was now in decline, as in most Christian lands. The Turks considered themselves superior in pottery, textiles, rugs, decorations, even in architecture. They had inherited the art of endowing abstract painting with logic, communication, and significance. They gloried in the splendor of their faïence (as on the Fountain of Ahmed III in Constantinople), the unfading gleam of their tiles, the strength and delicacy of their weaves, the sturdy brilliance of their rugs. Anatolia and the Caucasus were noted in this age for the lustrous pile and strict geometrical design of their carpets, especially of their prayer rugs, whose columns and pointed arches kept the bent worshiper facing the mihrab that indicated, in each mosque, the direction of Mecca. And the Turks preferred their domed and tiled and mina-retted mosques to the spires and arches and gloomy grandeur of Gothic cathedrals. Even in this declining age they raised the majestic mosques of Nuri-Osmanieh (1748) and Laleli-Jamissi (1765), and Ahmed III brought the style of the Alhambra to the palace that he built in 1729. Constantinople, despite its tangled streets and noisome slums, was probably the most impressive, as well as the largest, of European capitals; its population of two million souls11 was double that of London, three times that of Paris, eight times that of Rome.12 When Lady Mary looked out upon the city and the port from the palace of the British ambassador, she thought they constituted “perhaps, all together, the most beautiful prospect in the world.”13
Over this Ottoman Empire, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, reigned the sultans of the decline. We have considered elsewhere14 the causes of that decline: the movement of Asia-bound West-European commerce around Africa by sea instead of overland through Egypt or western Asia; the destruction or neglect of the irrigation canals; the expansion of the empire to distances too great for effective central rule; the consequent independence of the pashas and the separatism of the provinces; the deterioration of the central government through corruption, incompetence, and sloth; the repeated rebellions of Janissaries repudiating the discipline that had made them strong; the domination of life and thought by a fatalistic and unprogressive religion; and the lassitude of sultans who preferred the arms of women to those of war.
Ahmed III began his reign by allowing the Janissaries to dictate his choice of a grand vizier. It was this vizier who, when he led 200,000 Turks against the 38,000 troops of Peter the Great at the River Prut, accepted a bribe of 230,000 rubles to let the cornered Czar escape (July 21, 1711). When Venice incited the Montenegrins to revolt, Turkey declared war against Venice (1715), and completed the conquest of Crete and Greece. When Austria intervened, Turkey declared war against Austria (1716); but Eugene of Savoy defeated the Turks at Peterwardein, and compelled the Sultan, by the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), to evacuate Hungary, to cede Belgrade and parts of Wallachia to Austria, and to surrender to Venice certain strongholds in Albania and Dalmatia. An attempt to balance these losses by raids on Persia brought more reverses; a mob led by a bath attendant killed the Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, and forced Ahmed to abdicate (1730).
His nephew, Mahmud I (r. 1730-54), renewed the struggle with the West to determine by war the flow of taxes and the doctrines of theology. One Turkish army took Ochakov and Kilburun from Russia, another recovered Belgrade from Austria. But the military decline of Turkey was resumed under Mustafa III (1757-74). In 1762 Bulgaria declared itself independent. In 1769 Turkey opened war with Russia to prevent the spread of Russian power in Poland; so began the long conflict in which the armies of Catherine the Great inflicted fatal repulses upon the Turks. After Mustafa’s death his brother Abdul-Hamid I (1774-89) signed the humiliating Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774), which finished Turkish influence in Poland, South Russia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, and Turkish control of the Black Sea. Abdul-Hamid renewed the war in 1787, suffered disastrous routs, and died of grief. Turkey had to wait for Kemal Pasha to end two centuries of chaos and make it a modern state.
II. AFRICAN ISLAM
The Turks, after conquering Arabic Egypt (1517), delegated its government to pashas and viceroys. The Mamelukes, who had ruled Egypt since 1250, were allowed to retain local power as the beys of the twelve sanjaks into which the country was divided. While the pashas lost their vigor in luxury, the beys trained their soldiers to personal loyalty, and soon challenged the authority of the hated viceroys. The most enterprising of these local rulers was ‘Ali Bey, who in boyhood had been sold as a slave. In 1766 he deposed the pasha; in 1769 he declared Egypt independent. Feverish with success, he led his Mameluke troops to the conquest of Arabia, captured Mecca, and took the titles of Sultan of Egypt and Khakan of the Two Seas (the Red and the Mediterranean). In 1771 he sent abu’l-Ahahab with thirty thousand men to conquer Syria; abu’l-Ahahab conquered, but then allied himself with the Porte, and led his army back into Egypt. ‘Ali fled to Acre, organized another army, met the forces of abu’l-Ahahab and the Turks, fought till he was disabled by wounds, was captured, and died within a week (1773). Egypt became again a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Beneath such oscillations of power and ecstasies of homicide the ships and caravans of trade, the industry of craftsmen, the annual overflow of the Nile, and the labor of fellaheen in the fertile mud, maintained in Egypt an economy whose profits went to a minority dowered by nature or circumstance with ability or place. The toil and yield of fields and seas fed the cities—here, above all, Alexandria, one of the greatest ports, and Cairo, one of the most populous capitals, of the eighteenth-century world. The streets were narrow to obstruct the sun, and were made picturesque by latticed windows and balconies from which the women of the harem could look unseen upon the life below. The larger streets hummed with handicrafts that defied capitalistic intrusion or machine production. In Islam every industry was an art, and the quality of the product took the place of quantity. The poor made beautiful things for the rich, but they never sold their pride.
Three hundred mosques supported the poor of Cairo with hope, and adorned it with massive domes, shady porticos, and stately minarets. One mosque, El Azhar, was also the mother university of Islam; to it came two or three thousand students, from as far east as Malaysia and as far west as Morocco, to learn Koranic grammar, rhetoric, theology, ethics, and law. The graduates of universities constituted the ulema, or body of scholars, from whom were chosen the teachers and judges. It was a regimen made for a rigorous orthodoxy in religion, morals, and politics.
So morals hardly changed from century to century. Puberty came earlier than in the north; many girls married at twelve or thirteen, some at ten; to be unmarried at sixteen was a disgrace. Only the rich could afford the polygamy that Koranic law allowed. A cuckolded husband was not only permitted by law, but was encouraged by public opinion, to put the offending wife to death.15 Islamic theology, like the Christian, considered woman a main source of evil, which could be controlled o
nly by her strict subordination. Children grew up in the discipline of the harem; they learned to love their mother and to fear and honor their father; nearly all of them developed self-restraint and courtesy.16 Good manners prevailed in all classes, along with a certain ease and grace of motion probably derived from the women, who may have derived it from carrying burdens on their heads. The climate forbade haste, and sanctioned indolence.
Polygamy did not prevent prostitution, for prostitutes could provide the excitation that familiarity had allayed. The courtesans of Egypt specialized in lascivious dances; some ancient monuments reveal the antiquity of this lure. Every large town allotted to prostitutes a special quarter where they might practice their arts without fear of the law. As in all civilizations, women skilled in erotic dances were engaged to vibrate before male assemblies, and in some cases women also took pleasure in witnessing such performances.17
Music served both love and war; in either case it aroused attack and soothed defeat. Professional musicians, of either sex, could be engaged to provide entertainment. “I have heard the most celebrated musicians in Cairo,” said Edward Lane in 1833, “and have been more charmed with their songs … than with any other music that I have ever enjoyed.”18 The favorite instrument was the kemengeh, a kind of emaciated viol, with two strings of horsehair over a sounding box made of a cocoanut shell partly cut open between center and top, and covered with fish skin tightly stretched. The performer sat cross-legged, rested the pointed end of the instrument upon the ground, and stroked the strings with a bow of horsehair and ash. Or the artist sat with a large chano on, or zither, on his lap, and plucked the strings with horn plectra attached to the forefingers. The ancient lute now took the form of a guitar (the co’d). Add a flute, a mandolin, and a tambourine, and the ensemble would provide an orchestra whose strains might suit a civilized taste better than the primitive music that now agitates Occidental gatherings.
The “Barbary States,” or lands of the allegedly barbarous Berbers—Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco—entered history in the eighteenth century chiefly through the exploits of their corsairs or the assassination of their beys or deys. These governments, by sending occasional “presents” to the sultans at Constantinople, maintained virtual independence. The people lived predominantly by agriculture or piracy; the ransoms paid for Christian captives were a substantial part of the national income; the corsair captains, however, were mostly Christians.19 The arts maintained a precarious existence, but the Moroccan builders kept enough skill to blazon with radiant blue and green tiles the lordly “Bab-Mansur” that was added as a gateway in 1732 to the immense seventeenth-century palace-mosque of Mulai Ismail at Meknes, then the seat of the Moroccan sultans. Mulai Ismail, in a reign of fifty-five years (1672-1727), established order, begot hundreds of children, and thought his achievements warranted him in asking for his harem a daughter of Louis XIV.20 It is difficult for us to appreciate ways of life much different from our own, but it is helpful to remember the remark of the Moroccan traveler who, on returning from a visit to Europe, exclaimed, “What a comfort to be getting back to civilization!”21
III. PERSIA: 1722-89
A Persian would have expressed similar relief on returning to his native land after a sojourn in Christendom, or even in Ottoman Islam. Until the fall of the Safavid dynasty (1736) an educated Persian would probably have ranked Iranian civilization as superior to any contemporary culture except possibly the Chinese. He would have deprecated Christianity as a reversion to popular polytheism. He might have admitted the superiority of Christendom in science, commerce, and war, but he would have preferred art to science and handicrafts to mechanized industry.
The eighteenth was a bitter century for Persia. Conquered by Afghans from the southeast, harassed by slave-gathering raids from the Uzbeks in the northeast, attacked by Russian depredations in the north, repeatedly overrun by vast Turkish armies in the west, impoverished by the taxgathering tyranny of its own spectacular Nadir Shah, and dismembered by the brutal conflict of rival families for the Persian throne—how could Iran continue, in this turbulence, the great traditions of Persian literature and art?
In the sixteenth century the land now called Afghanistan was divided by three governments: Kabul under Indian rule, Balkh under the Uzbeks, and Herat and Kandahar under the Persians. In 1706-08 the Afghans of Kandahar rose under Mir (Amir) Vais and expelled the Persians. His son Mir Mahmud invaded Persia, deposed the Safavid ruler Husein, and made himself shah. Religion strengthened his arms, for the Afghans followed the Sunni, or orthodox, form of Mohammedanism, and considered the Shi‘a Persians to be damned infidels. Mahmud put to death in hot blood three thousand of Husein’s bodyguard, three hundred Persian nobles, and some two hundred children suspected of resenting the murder of their fathers. After a long rest Mahmud in one day (February 7, 1725) slaughtered all the surviving members of the royal family except Husein and two of his younger children. Then Mahmud went insane, and was killed, aged twenty-seven, by his cousin Ashraf (April 22, 1725), who proclaimed himself shah. So began the bloodletting that devitalized Persia in that century.
Tahmasp, son of Husein, appealed to Russia and Turkey for help; they responded by agreeing to partition Persia between them (1725). A Turkish army entered Persia and took Hamadan, Kazvin, and Maragha, but was defeated by Ashraf near Kermanshah. The Turkish troops lacked fervor; why, they asked, should they fight their fellow Sunnis, the Afghans, to restore the heretical Shi’a Safavids? The Turks made peace with Ashraf, but retained the provinces they had conquered (1727).
Ashraf now seemed secure, but a year later his usurped and alien power was challenged by the rise of an obscure Persian who swept in a few years through a military career as brilliant and bloody as any in history. Nadir Kuli (i.e., “Slave of the Wonderful”—i.e., of Allah) was born in a tent in northeastern Iran (1686). He helped his father to tend their flocks of sheep and goats; he had no schooling but a hard and adventurous life. When he was eighteen, and had succeeded his dead father as head of the family, he and his mother were carried off by Uzbek raiders to Khiva and were sold as slaves. The mother died in bondage, but Nadir escaped, became the head of a robber band, captured Kalat, Nishapur, and Meshed, declared himself and these cities loyal to Shah Tahmasp, and undertook to drive the Afghans out of Persia and restore Tahmasp to the Persian throne. He accomplished this in swift campaigns (1729-30); Tahmasp was reinstated, and made Nadir “sultan” of Khurasan, Seistan, Kerman, and Mazanderan.
The victorious general soon set out to recover the provinces that Turkey had seized. By decisively defeating the Turks at Hamadan (1731) he brought Iraq and Azerbaijan under Persian rule. Hearing of a rebellion in Khurasan, he raised the siege of Erivan and marched fourteen hundred miles across Iraq and Iran to invest Herat—a march that dwarfs the famous crossings of Germany by Frederick the Great in the Seven Years’ War. Meanwhile Tahmasp in person took the field against the Turks, lost all that Nadir had won, and ceded Georgia and Armenia to Turkey on promise of Turkish help against Russia (1732). Nadir rushed back from the east, denounced the treaty, deposed and imprisoned Tahmasp, set up Tahmasp’s six-month-old son as Shah Abbas III, proclaimed himself regent, and sent Turkey a declaration of war.
Having raised, by persuasion or conscription, an army of eighty thousand men, he marched against the Turks. Near Samarra he encountered a vast Turkish force led by Topal Osman, who, maimed in both legs, commanded from a litter. Nadir twice had horses shot under him; his standard-bearer fled, thinking him slain; an Arab contingent on whose aid he had relied turned against him; the Persian rout was complete (July 18, 1733). He assembled the remnants at Hamadan, recruited, armed, and fed new thousands, marched again to meet the Turks, and overwhelmed them at Leilan in a holocaust in which Topal Osman was killed. Another revolt having broken out in southeastern Persia, Nadir again crossed from west to east, and overcame the rebel leader, who committed suicide. Marching back across Persia and Iraq, he met eighty thousand Turks at Baghavand (1735), and
so thoroughly defeated them that Turkey signed a peace ceding Tiflis, Gandzha, and Erivan to Persia.
Nadir had not forgotten that Peter the Great had attacked Persia in 1722-23, appropriating the Caspian provinces of Gilan, Astarabad, and Mazanderan, and the cities of Derbent and Baku. Russia, busy on other fronts, had restored the three provinces to Persia (1732). Now (1735) Nadir threatened that unless Russia withdrew from Derbent and Baku he would ally himself with Turkey against Russia. The two cities were surrendered, and Nadir entered Isfahan as the triumphant rebuilder of Persian power. When the child Abbas III died (1736), ending the Safavid dynasty, Nadir wedded reality to form, and made himself Nadir Shah.
Believing that the religious differences between Turkey and Persia made for repeated wars, he declared that henceforth Persia would abandon its Shi‘a heresy and accept the orthodoxy of Sunni Islam. When the head of the Shi‘a sect condemned this move Nadir had him strangled as quietly as possible. He confiscated the religious endowments of Kazvin to meet the expenses of his army, saying that Persia owed more to its army than to its religion.22 Then, lonesome for war, he appointed his son Riza Kuli regent, and led 100,000 men to the conquest of Afghanistan and India.
For a year he besieged Kandahar. When it surrendered (1738) he treated its defenders so leniently that a troop of Afghans enlisted under his standard and remained faithful to him till his death. He marched on to Kabul, the key to the Khyber Pass; there the captured booty enabled him to keep his army in good spirits. Mohammed Shah, Mogul emperor of India, had refused to believe a Persian invasion possible; one of his governors had killed Nadir’s envoy; now Nadir crossed the Himalayas, took Peshawar, crossed the Indus, and advanced to within sixty miles of Delhi before Mohammed’s army resisted him. On the plain of Karnal the immense hordes met in battle (1739); the Indians relied on their elephants, the Persians attacked these patient animals with fireballs; the elephants turned and fled, throwing the Indian army into disorder; ten thousand Indians were slain, more were captured; Mohammed Shah came as a suppliant for mercy “to our heavenly presence,” Nadir reported.23 The victor exacted from him the surrender of Delhi and of nearly all its portable wealth, amounting to £87,500,000, and including the famous Peacock Throne, which had been made (1628-35) for Shah Jehan at the zenith of Mogul power. A riot among the populace killed some of Nadir’s soldiers; he avenged them by allowing his army to massacre 100,000 natives in seven hours. He apologized for this by giving his son Nasrulla in marriage to Mohammed’s daughter. Then he marched unimpeded back to Persia, having established himself as the greatest conqueror since Timur.