Under Suleyman the Magnificent a paroxysm of organizing took place in this sprawling mosaic of cultures and creeds. His flattering sobriquet is used only by westerners; for Turks, he is the Lawgiver. His codification of law, the largest such undertaking since Justinian had done likewise a thousand years before on the same acropolis, brought a semblance of order to the ad hoc elaboration of Ottoman customs. As befitted an exceptional leader, Suleyman was also a builder. His principal architect, Sinan, a product of the boy tribute and believed to be of Anatolian Christian stock, undertook several prestigious projects for the sultan, the largest and most awe-inspiring being the Suleymaniye Mosque, a thicket of minarets and domes rising on the height near an aqueduct constructed for the Roman emperor Valens in the fourth century* In the generations immediately following Fatih's conquest, the great Islamic sanctuaries of Kostantiniyye, designed to rival if not surpass the Ayasofya, rose over the ruins of Constantine's new Rome. The citadel of the sea of faith had been replaced by its last and greatest palimpsest.
In the Istanbul of today are vestiges of the centuries of convivencia begun by the events of 1453. In what was Galata, now Beyoglu, a clutch of Latin churches and western embassies and schools attests to the time, which stretched from the medieval to the modern, when this Islamic capital played host to scores of nationalities, who, if they did not lock arms, at least rubbed elbows. Much of the city's subsequent, postmedieval development had more to do with European power politics and a stagnant Ottoman sultanate than any considerations of faith. In the twentieth century the rise of Turkish nationalism in the wake of Ottoman collapse put the final nail in the coffin of the old cosmopolitanism, even if a new and vibrant Istanbul has since emerged in our own time. To the careless traveler, all that old Kostantiniyye evokes is not the remarkable convivencia of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries but a sort of lingering titillation about the harem of the Topkapi, a legacy of overwrought European travel writing. At Ataturk International Airport, those departing the city can still buy a jar of fig mush labeled, in French of course, L'Aphrodisiaque des Sultans—a kitsch reminder of the tens of thousands of girls, many of them Slavs, abducted, purchased, or received as gifts for the sultan's seraglio, the courts of the pashas, and the brothels of Galata. This "girl tribute"—along with stories of Sudanese eunuchs ruling the harem roost—has overshadowed, in the popular imagination, the world beyond the walls of Topkapi. While hardly a multicultural Arcadia, the Kostantiniyye of convivencia was, for three centuries, the largest, most variegated city in Europe.
The Suleymaniye Mosque complex, Sinan's masterpiece in Istanbul. In the upper left of the photograph stands the Aqueduct of Valens.
In its Fener district, not far from the fateful walls of the Blachernae and the Lycus, stands the church of St. Mary of the Mongols, so named for a Byzantine princess who funded it after coming home, happy to be widowed, from the court of a Mongol khan. It is the only preconquest church of Constantinople still in use as a Christian sanctuary. Indeed, many of the latter-day churches of the district are deserted—sectarian riots of 1955 forced most Greek Istanbullus into exile. The church of the present-day patriarch, also hidden in Fener, is a model of discretion, one whose low profile would no doubt shock even Gennadios.
Discretion is one thing; invisibility, another. On a recent visit to the maze of Fener, St. Mary of the Mongols was nowhere to be found. Enlightenment came in the form of a little boy, on his way home for lunch from a Quranic school. Yes, he knew where the mosque of the Rumi was; and after winding through crowded streets, he helpfully waited outside while his charges inspected the old icons within and the framed firman—the decree of the sultan—guaranteeing freedom of worship and perpetual ownership of the building. The Conqueror's signature flowed across the old parchment.
The tughra, or sultan's official monogram, of Mehmet II. It is displayed prominently on a decree of inalienability in the Church of St. Mary of the Mongols, Istanbul.
Back in the sunlight, thanks were expressed and farewells exchanged. As the boy walked away, someone thought to ask his name.
He looked back over his shoulder, not breaking stride, and said, "Fatih."
*One needn't look so far back for such counterexamples: just prior to the Athens Olympic Games of 2004 a vocal faction in the Orthodox Church opposed the erection of a mosque near the city's airport, claiming it would confuse inbound tourists about the religious identity of Greece.
*Valens was slain at the battle of Adrianople (Edirne) in 376 by the Visigoths, an event deemed crucial in the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus the aqueduct evokes several strands of our story: the disappearance of the mare nostrum; the Visigoths, who were vanquished by the Franks near Poitiers (507) and by the Muslims in Iberia; and the early Ottoman capital of Edirne, from which Fatih marched to topple the new Rome (Constantinople). Appropriately, nowadays a boulevard named for Ataturk, the man who ushered out the Ottomans, runs beneath the structure.
CHAPTER TEN
MALTA 1565
The failure of the Ottomans; the end of the
medieval sea of faith
Sometime before daybreak on June 24, 1565, a flotilla of rafts gingerly eased into the waters of the Grand Harbor of Malta. The harbor's main peninsula, now occupied by the city of Valletta, was still wreathed in the plumes from spent cannonshot when the five small craft began their journey southward. Their destination lay two hundred meters across a cove, where two smaller peninsulas, perpendicular to the main one, were crowded with hundreds of men in armor. Above them, from halyards attached to the battlements, flew the banners of their allegiance. The flags bore the eight-point cross that signified the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.
The men holding the arquebuses and muskets atop the fortresses on Birgu and Senglea, the two spits of land sticking out into the Grand Harbor, were of the same breed of warrior-monks who had come to grief at Hattin some four centuries earlier; in 1565 their final hideout on the island of Malta, a speck of sandstone between Sicily and Libya, seemed imperiled as well. Where once, on the tip of the main peninsula, stood the star-shaped Fort St. Elmo, defended for more than a month by several hundred fellow knights against a huge besieging army, there was now only smoke and silence, and the remains of some eight thousand Turkish soldiers, killed in trying to overcome the fanatical defense put up by the Christians. In its final weeks, the great stone mass of St. Elmo had rocked, almost danced, through a punishing artillery barrage. From the fort's peninsula of death the mysterious waterborne offering floated into the darkness. As the sun rose on the feast day of John the Baptist, the patron saint of their order, the watching knights on the peninsulas of Birgu and Senglea realized that they were to receive, apparently, a gift from their attackers.
At a word from Jean Parisot de la Valette, the grand master of the order after whom Valletta would later be named, some local men of Malta plunged into the water to intercept the flotilla. The Maltese commoners, lorded over by French, Spanish, and German knights, performed the dirty work for their rulers, who had arrived on the island just thirty-five years earlier in the latest stop of their Mediterranean itinerary. First quartered in Jerusalem and in such places as the Krak des Chevaliers,* the Knights of St. John were evicted by Saladin and his successors, then driven out of Outremer altogether when Acre fell in 1291. After a brief stay on Cyprus, they set themselves up on Rhodes, whence for two full centuries their galleys disrupted Muslim shipping and raided the lands of Islam with impunity. In those settled years the order, which had been founded to comfort sick pilgrims en route to Jerusalem, took on its definitive late-medieval form: a confraternity of aristocratic Christian corsairs.
After the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, the piratical knights in Rhodes pointedly refused to pay homage or even respectful lip-service to Fatih. The young sultan let the insult pass for several years but eventually, in 1480, had his armies lay siege to the island. The knights could not be dislodged. Fatih's great-grandson, Suleyman the Mag
nificent, finally lanced the Christian boil in the eastern Mediterranean in 1522, when Rhodes surrendered, and the youthful sultan, moved to magnanimity by the suicidal bravery of the knights, renounced his right to massacre and let the Hospitalers go free. Seven years of undignified indigence followed, as these scions of the great families of Europe wandered the continent badgering their crowned cousins for a permanent land grant. The order needed a base in the Mediterranean from which to resume launching its marauding galleys. In the end the Habsburg court, correctly foreseeing the knights' usefulness in guarding the approaches to its precious possession of Sicily, bestowed the stony haven of Malta on the order in 1530. Every November 1 the knights, as a rent payment, had to hand over to the Spanish king (who was also the Holy Roman Emperor) one Maltese falcon. The place was hardly the garden of delight they had known in Rhodes, but it was a base all the same. The Maltese, of course, were not consulted. Henceforth they were to be pawns in the knights' dangerous game of baiting the Ottomans.
Thus on a June morning in 1565 a handful of Maltese men found themselves compelled to take a terrifying early-morning swim. The headlands of their superb natural harbor had become a firing range; scores of primed cannons were trained on them as they performed their task. The centrality of their predicament was fitting. Natives of what has been termed the navel of the Mediterranean, the Maltese, long before the arrival of the knights, had had more than a passing acquaintance with foreign perils: almost every wave of Mediterranean conquest—pagan, Christian, Muslim—had engulfed their island home. Speakers of a Semitic language, the Maltese claim ancestry from the Phoenicians who had colonized neighboring Carthage in the centuries prior to the establishment of the mare nostrum. Local lore explains their long-standing Christianity by having none other than St. Paul himself washing up on a Maltese beach and soddenly converting the entire population in about 59 c.E. Whatever the truth about their somewhat dimly understood past, the one indisputable trait of the Maltese is that they they were, and still are, at home in the sea. It is supremely appropriate that these people, living square in the middle of the Mediterranean, should participate in the last drama of the medieval sea of faith.
The swimmers reached the flotilla. Cries of horror shattered the expectant quiet: lashed to each of the bobbing rafts was the decapitated body of a defender of Fort St. Elmo. Some of the torsos were nailed to their floats in an attitude of crucifixion. Such was the gift to the Knights of St. John on the holiest day of their year. The Turks on the far shore had sent them a clear message: expect no mercy, no honor, no respect, alive or dead.
Did the Muslims who had contrived this ingenious outrage know the significance of the feast day? They would certainly have known the fate of John the Baptist, beheaded at Salome's behest, and the Turkish commanders, especially those from cosmopolitan Kostantiniyye, were no strangers to the beliefs of their foes. Thousands of Christian slaves—and converts to Islam—were in their forces; indeed, the admiral of the Turkish fleet had been born a Hungarian Christian. Moreover the Order of St. John, which had spent generations in Rhodes attacking the Anatolian coast, was an enemy with whom the Turks were on terms approaching intimacy. The magnimde of the insult, the perfect barbarity of its timing and manner of execution, was anything but accidental.
The bodies were hauled ashore, and the knights sadly identified their mutilated comrades. Grand Master Valette immediately ordered the dungeons of the forts on Birgu and Senglea—the two remaining Christian-held peninsulas of the Grand Harbor—to be emptied of their prisoners. The captives were Muslims, taken either in skirmishes during the month of fighting prior to the fall of St. Elmo or in raids effected by the order's galleys in previous years. Scores of men were brought out, blinking, into the unforgiving sunshine. It was midsummer. The executioner's ax fell.
In the late morning, the victorious Janissaries picking over the remnants of Fort St. Elmo on the main peninsula leaped for cover as a cannonade erupted from Birgu and Senglea. The missiles sailed over Malta's Grand Harbor, the same narrows the hideous flotilla had traversed in the dead of night, and landed with a muffled concussion in the muck of the fallen fortress. There was no shrapnel, no exploding shot. Aghast, the Turks saw the reason—the cannonballs were heads. The artillery of the knights fired another round, then another and another, until the heads of all their prisoners had been lofted back across the Grand Harbor. The reasoning behind this sickening spectacle has not been recorded, but its inhuman one-upmanship would later give pause even to the most ardent admirers of the knights. The Muslims, after all, had decapitated dead defenders; the Christians, defenseless prisoners. In the heat and blood of the Maltese summer of 1565, however, no time remained for scruples. Indeed, the knights had precious little time even to savor trumping their enemy in bloodiness; they were called from the ramparts to assemble in the main church of Birgu, the sole village on the eastern spit of land sticking into the Grand Harbor, for the solemn mass in honor of their patron, St. John the Baptist. The dictates of holiness were not to be neglected.
D. H. Lawrence observed of Malta that "all the world might come here to sharpen its knives." Seen from a tour boat plying the island's coves and creeks, the city of Valletta confirms his judgment resoundingly. In addition to its hinterland's exposed bedrock, barren and unforgiving in the summer sun, a centuries-long tradition of fortress building in the capital has created a curtain of brooding stone. Massive crenellated walls tower over the shores of most of Valletta's many promontories, paid for by wealthy knights and, much later, by British governments. (In 1800 the Royal Navy took Malta from Napoleon, who had preemptively captured it from the knights two years earlier.) As the boat nears the rebuilt Fort St. Elmo, a behemoth of gray blocks, one cannot help thinking that this small island might rival the Strategic Air Command's mountain in Colorado as the most fortified place on earth. Certainly, no other port of the Mediterranean can have been so ostentatiously outfitted for siege warfare. As a final martial meeting place between the standard-bearers of two faiths, few settings could be more cinematic. The sea, the stake in the great medieval showdown, stretches out all around a city proudly standing behind mammoth ramparts. And here, the custodians of memory appear to be firmly in charge. This is no ironic Poitiers or half-forgotten Manzikert—Malta takes its memorializing seriously.
Valletta, a city planned and constructed just after the siege of 1565, has no choice but to revel in its past. Impeccably restored following the depredations of the Second World War, the Maltese capital seems like a visitor just off the boat from the Baroque era. Its attachment to the past is innate: Valletta's builders, the knights, were backward-looking by nature, even in the era in which they lived. By the end of the sixteenth century, their attachment to faith-based adventurism had gradually made the order an anachronism in the affairs of the continent. Be-latedness, in fact, seems key to the Maltese experience. Even at the moment of the island's greatest glory, standing firm in the face of Ottoman might, the tides of western cupidity and curiosity had already shifted away, making the contest for Mediterranean supremacy a sideshow in the affairs of Europe. Eyes turned to riches and rivalries on the Atlantic instead. The Genoan Giustiniani Longo had rushed east to defend Constantinople and an old world, whereas a generation later the Genoan Columbus went west, to serve the Spanish kings in the quest for a lucrative new one. The gold and silver of the Americas came to fill the coffers of the nascent nation-states in western Europe, and the sea route to the east, around the Cape of Good Hope, had been opened for business. No longer did the conveyors of spices, slaves, and silks necessarily pass through the dar al Islam to reach the West—Arab caravans were being replaced by Portuguese caravels.
The Grand Harbor of Malta. In the foreground, Senglea; beyond it, Fort St. Angelo on Birgu. To the left is the point of Valletta near Fort St. Elmo.
Crucially, then, the conflation of belief in another world and self-interest in this one, which was the leitmotiv of the encounter between Christian and Muslim in the Mediterranean, was to b
e a spur to action elsewhere, for the sea had slipped from its age-old centrality. This took time—the early modern period would witness violent clashes in the Mediterranean—but the process had begun. Even the rationale of belief was no longer a reflexive explanation for success or failure. Not that the spirit failed to move—indeed, Europe was about to plunge into the religious wars between Catholic and Protestant that would shatter its fragile medieval polity forever. Yet already in the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun had gingerly suggested that the inevitable rise and fall of empire might lie outside the confines of confessional thought or divinely guided destiny. For the thinkers of the Renaissance, whether a dark Machiavelli or a sunny Erasmus, the certainties of the crusaders had long ago crumbled into dust. The changes wrought by Renaissance and Reformation in the west, and by the consolidation of Ottoman power in the east, were clear enough in outline that far-seeing genius like Ibn Khaldun's was no longer required to realize that one's god might not necessarily take an interest in the doings of caliph and king. Indeed, Catholic France, its enmity toward the encircling Habsburgs of Spain and central Europe as cold as steel, went so far as to make a defensive alliance with the Muslim sovereign of Kostantiniyye. In the sixteenth century, Turkish fleets dropped anchor in Toulon. St. Louis, the thirteenth-century crusader king, would have been shocked at the confessional complaisance of his issue—but the sea of faith he had sailed was no more.
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