by Will Durant
Orkhan made Brusa, sanctified with his father’s bones, the new capital of the Ottomans. “Manifest destiny”—i.e., desire plus power—drew Orkhan toward the Mediterranean, ancient circlet of commerce, wealth, and civilization. In the very year of Brusa’s fall he seized Nicomedia, which became Izmid; in 1330 Nicaea, which became Iznik; in 1336 Pergamum, which became Bergama. These cities, reeking with history, were centers of crafts and trade; they depended for food and markets upon environing agricultural communities already held by the Ottomans; they had to live with this hinterland or die. They did not resist long; they had been oppressed by their Byzantine governors, and heard that Orkhan taxed lightly and allowed religious liberty; and many of these Near Eastern Christians were harassed heretics—Nestorians or Monophysites. Soon a large part of the conquered terrain accepted the Moslem creed; so war solves theological problems before which reason stands in hesitant impotence. Having thus extended his realm, Orkhan took the title Sultan of the Ottomans. The Byzantine emperors made their peace with him, hired his soldiers, and allowed his son Suleiman to establish Ottoman strongholds on European soil. Orkhan died in 1359, aged seventy-one, firmly placed in the memory of his people.
His successors formed a dynasty hardly equaled in history for a merger of martial vigor and skill, administrative ability, barbarous cruelty, and cultured devotion to letters, science, and art. Murad (Amurath) I was the least attractive of the line. Illiterate, he signed his name by pressing his inked fingers upon documents, in the fashion of less distinguished homicides. When his son Saondji led a criminally unsuccessful revolt against him Murad tore out the youth’s eyes, cut off his head, and compelled the fathers of the rebels to behead their sons.32 He trained an almost invincible army, conquered most of the Balkans, and eased their submission by giving them a more efficient government than they had known under Christian domination.
Bajazet I inherited his father’s crown on the field of Kosova (1389). After leading the army to victory, he ordered the execution of his brother Yakub, who had fought valiantly throughout that crucial day. Such fratricide became a regular aftermath of an Ottoman accession, on the principle that sedition against the government is so disruptive that all potential claimants to the throne should be disposed of at the earliest convenience. Bajazet earned the title of Yilderim—the Thunderbolt—by the speed of his military strategy, but he lacked the statesmanship of his father, and wasted some of his wild energy in sexual enterprise. Stephen Lazarevitch, vassal ruler of Serbia, contributed a sister to Bajazet’s harem; this Lady Despoina became his favorite wife, taught him to love wine and sumptuous banquets, and perhaps unwittingly weakened him as a man. His pride flourished till his fall. After deflowering Europe’s chivalry at Nicopolis he released the Count of Nevers with a characteristic challenge, as reported or improved by Froissart:
John, I know well thou art a great lord in thy country, and son to a great lord. Thou art young, and peradventure thou shalt bear some blame or shame that this adventure hath fallen to thee in thy first chivalry; and to excuse thyself of this blame, and to recover thine honor, peradventure thou wilt assemble a puissance of men, and come to make war against me. If I were in doubt or fear thereof, ere thou departed I should cause thee to swear by thy law and faith that never thou, nor none of thy company, should bear arms... against me. But I will neither make thee nor none of thy company to make any such oath or promise, but I will that when thou art returned and art at thy pleasure, thou shalt raise what puissance thou wilt, and spare not, but come against me; thou shalt find me always ready to receive thee and thy company.... And this that I say, show it to whom thou list, for I am able to do deeds of arms, and every ready to conquer further into Christendom.33
When Timur captured Bajazet at Ankara he treated him with all respect despite the year of insulting correspondence that had passed between them. He ordered the Sultan’s bonds removed, seated him at his side, assured him that his life would be spared, and directed that three splendid tents should be fitted out for his suite. But when Bajazet tried to escape he was confined to a room with barred windows, which legend magnified into an iron cage. Bajazet fell ill; Timur summoned the best physicians to treat him, and sent the Lady Despoina to attend and console him. These ministrations failed to revive the vital forces of the broken Sultan, and Bajazet died a prisoner, a year after his defeat.
His son Mohammed I reorganized the Ottoman government and power. Though he blinded one pretender and killed another, he acquired the cognomen “Gentleman” by his courtly manners, his just rule, and the ten years of peace that he allowed to Christendom. Murad II had like tastes, and preferred poetry to war; but when Constantinople set up a rival to depose him, and Hungary violated its pledge of peace, he proved himself, at Varna (1444), as good a general as any. Then he retired to Magnesia in Asia Minor, where twice a week he held reunions of poets and pundits, read verse, and talked science and philosophy. A revolt at Adrianople called him back to Europe; he suppressed it, and overcame Hunyadi János in a second battle of Kosovo. When he died (1451), after thirty years of rule, Christian historians ranked him among the greatest monarchs of his time. His will directed that he should be buried at Brusa in a modest chapel without a roof, “so that the mercy and blessing of God might come unto him with the shining of the sun and moon, and the falling of the rain and dew upon his grave.” 34
Mohammed II equaled his father in culture and conquests, political acumen, and length of reign, but not in justice or nobility. Bettering Christian instruction, he broke solemn treaties, and tarnished his victories with superfluous slaughter. He was Orientally subtle in negotiation and strategy. Asked what his plans were, he answered, “If a hair in my beard knew, I would pluck it out.” 35 He spoke five languages, was well read in several literatures, excelled in mathematics and engineering, cultivated the arts, gave pensions to thirty Ottoman poets, and sent royal gifts to poets in Persia and India. His grand vizier, Mahmud Pasha, seconded him as a patron of letters and art; he and his master supported so many colleges and pious foundations that the Sultan received the name “Father of Good Works.” Mohammed was also “Sire of Victory”; to him and his cannon Constantinople fell; under the guns of his navy the Black Sea became a Turkish pond; before his legions and diplomacy the Balkans crumbled into servitude. But this irresistible conqueror could not conquer himself. By the age of fifty he had worn himself out by every form of sexual excess; aphrodisiacs failed to implement his lust; finally his harem classed him with his eunuchs. He died (1481), aged fifty-one, just when his army seemed on the verge of conquering Italy for Islam.
A contest among his sons gave the throne to Bajazet II. The new sultan was not inclined to war, but when Venice took Cyprus, and challenged Turkish control of the eastern Mediterranean, he roused himself, deceived his deceivers with a pledge of peace, built an armada of 270 vessels, and destroyed a Venetian fleet off the coasts of Greece. A Turkish army raided northern Italy as far west as Vicenza (1502); Venice sued for peace; Bajazet gave her lenient terms, and retired to poetry and philosophy. His son Selim deposed him, and mounted the throne (1512); presently—some said of poison—Bajazet died.
History is in some aspects an alternation of contrasting themes: the moods and forms of one age are repudiated by the next, which tires of tradition and lusts for novelty; classicism begets romanticism, which begets realism, which begets impressionism; a period of war calls for a decade of peace, and peace prolonged invites aggressive war. Selim I despised his father’s pacific policy. Vigorous in frame and will, indifferent to pleasures and amenities, loving the chase and the camp, he won the nickname of “the Grim” by having nine relatives strangled to contracept revolt, and waging war after war of conquest. It did not displease him that Shah Isma’il of Persia raided the Turkish frontier. He registered a vow that if Allah would grant him victory over the Persians, he would build three mighty mosques—in Jerusalem, Buda, and Rome.36 Having heated the religious predilections of his people to the fighting point, he marched agai
nst Isma’il, captured Tabriz, and made northern Mesopotamia an Ottoman province. In 1515 he turned his artillery and Janissaries against the Mamluks, and added Syria, Arabia, and Egypt to his realm (1517). He carried to Constantinople, as an honored captive, the Cairene “caliph”—rather the high priest—of orthodox Mohammedanism; and thereafter the Ottoman sultans, like Henry VIII, became the masters of the church as well as of the state.
In the full glory of his powers Selim prepared to conquer Rhodes and Christendom. When all his preparations were complete he caught the plague and died (1520). Leo X, who had trembled more at Selim’s advance than at Luther’s rebellion, ordered all Christian churches to chant a litany of gratitude to God.
VI. ISLAMIC LITERATURE: 1400–1520
Even Selim the Grim threaded verses on rhyme, and bequeathed to Suleiman the Magnificent a royal divan of his collected poems as well as an empire ranging from the Euphrates to the Danube and the Nile. Twelve sultans and many princes—including that Prince Djem whom his brother Bajazet II paid Christian kings and popes to keep in refined confinement—appear among the 2,200 Ottoman poets who have won fame in the last six centuries.37 Most of these bards took their forms and ideas, sometimes the language, of their verse from the Persians; they continued to celebrate, in endless rivulets of rhyme, the greatness of Allah, the wisdom of the shah or sultan, and the trembling envy of the cypress trees seeing the white slenderness of the beloved’s legs. We of the West are now too familiar with these charms to thrill to such lofty similes; but the “terrible Turks,” whose women were alluringly robed from nose to toes, were stirred to the roots by these poetic revelations; and the poetry that in its denatured translation leaves us unmoved could inspire them to piety, polygamy, and war.
From a thousand dead immortals we cull with untutored fancy three names still unfamiliar to the provincial Occident. Ahmedi of Sives (d. 1413), taking his cue from the Persian master Nizami, wrote an Iskander-nama, or Book of Alexander, an immense epic in strong, crude style, which gave not only the story of Alexander’s conquest by Persia, but as well the history, religion, science, and philosophy of the Near East from the earliest times to Bajazet I. We must forgo quotation, for the English version is such stuff as nightmares are made of. The poetry of Ahmad Pasha (d. 1496) so delighted Mohammed II that the Sultan made him vizier; the poet fell in love with a pretty page in the conqueror’s retinue; Mohammed, having the same predilection, ordered the poet’s death; Ahmad sent his master so melting a lyric that Mohammed gave him the boy, but banished both to Brusa.38 There Ahmad took into his home a younger poet, soon destined to surpass him. Nejati (d. 1508), whose real name was Isa (Jesus), wrote an ode in praise of Mohammed II, and fastened it to the turban of the Sultan’s favorite partner in chess. Mohammed’s curiosity fell for the lure; he read the scroll, sent for the author, and made him an official of the royal palace. Bajazet II kept him in favor and affluence, and Nejati, triumphing heroically over prosperity, wrote in those two reigns some of the most lauded lyrics in Ottoman literature.
Even so the great masters of Moslem poetry were still the Persians. The court of Husein Baiqara at Herat so teemed with nightingales that his vizier, Mir Ali Shir Nawa’i, complained, “If you stretch out your feet you kick the backside of a poet”; to which a bard replied, “And so do you if you pull up yours.” 39 For Mir Ali Shir (d. 1501), besides helping to rule Khurasan, supporting literature and art, and winning renown as a miniaturist and a composer, was also a major poet—at once the Maecenas and Horace of his time. It was his enlightened patronage that gave aid and comfort to the painters Bihzad and Shah Muzaffar, and the musicians Qul-Muhammad, Shayki Na’i, and Husein Udi, and the supreme Moslem poet of the fifteenth century—Mulla Nuru’d-Din Abd-er-Rahman Jami (d. 1492).
In a long and uneventful life Jami found time to achieve fame as a scholar and mystic as well as a poet. As a Sufi he expounded in graceful prose the old mystic theme, that the joyous union of the soul with the Beloved—i.e., God—comes only when the soul realizes that self is a delusion, and that the things of this world are a maya of transitory phantoms melting in a mist of mortality. Most of Jami’s poetry is mysticism in verse, spiced with some attractive sensuality. Salaman wa Absal tells a pretty tale to point the superiority of divine to earthly love. Salaman is the son of the shah of Yun (i.e., Ionia); born without a mother (which is much more difficult than parthenogenesis), he is brought up by the fair princess Absal, who becomes enamored of him when he reaches fourteen. She conquers him with cosmetics:
The darkness of her eyes she darkened round
With surma, to benight him in midday,
And over them adorned and arched the bows
To wound him there when lost; her musky locks
Into so many snaky ringlets curled,
In which Temptation nestled o’er her cheek,
Whose rose she kindled with vermilion dew,
And then one subtle grain of musk laid there,
The bird of that belovéd heart to snare.
Sometimes, in passing, with a laugh would break
The pearl-enclosing ruby of her lips.... .
Or, rising as in haste, her golden anklets
Clash, at whose sudden summons to bring down
Under her silver feet the golden crown 40
of the heir-apparent Prince. He yields without effort to these lures, and for a time boy and lady enjoy a lyric love. The King reproaches the youth for such dalliance, and bids him steel himself for war and government. Instead Salaman elopes with Absal on a camel, “like sweet twin almonds in a single shell.” Reaching the sea, they make a boat, sail it “for a moon,” and come to a verdant isle rich in fragrant flowers, singing birds, and fruit falling profusely at their feet. But in this Eden conscience stabs the Prince with thoughts of the royal tasks he has shunned. He persuades Absal to return with him to Yun; he tries to train himself for kingship, but is so torn between duty and beauty that at last, half mad, he joins Absal in suicide: they build a pyre and leap hand in hand into its flames. Absal is consumed, but Salaman emerges incombustible. Now, his soul cleansed, he inherits and graces the throne—It is all an allegory, Jami explains: the King is God, Salaman is the soul of man, Absal is sensual delight; the happy isle is a Satanic Eden in which the soul is seduced from its divine destiny; the pyre is the fire of life’s experience, in which sensual desire is burned away; the throne that the purified soul attains is that of God Himself. It is hard to believe that a poet who could so sensitively picture a woman’s charms would seriously ask us to shun them, except occasionally.
With an audacity redeemed by the result, Jami dared to rhyme again the favorite themes of a dozen poets before him: Yusuf u Zulaikha, and Laila wa Majnun. In an eloquent exordium he restates the Sufi theory of heavenly and earthly beauty:
In the Primal Solitude, while yet Existence gave no sign of being, and the universe lay hid in the negation of itself, Something was.... . It was beauty absolute, showing Herself to Herself alone, and by Her own light. As of a most beautiful lady in the bridal chamber of mystery was Her robe, pure of all stain of imperfection. No mirror had Her face reflected, nor had the comb passed through Her tresses, nor the breeze with balmy breath stirred even a single hair, nor any nightingale come nestling to her Rose... But beauty cannot bear to be unknown; behold the Tulip on the mountain top, piercing the rock with its shoot at the first smile of spring.... So Beauty Eternal came forth from the Holy Places of Mystery to beam on all horizons and all souls; and a single ray, darting from Her, struck Earth and its Heavens; and so She was revealed in the mirror of created things.... And all atoms of the universe became as mirrors casting back each one an aspect of the Eternal Glory. Something of Her brightness fell upon the rose, and the nightingale was crazed with helpless love. Fire caught Her ardor, and a thousand moths came to perish in the flame.... And She it was who gave the Moon of Canaan that sweet brightness which made Zulaikha mad.41
From these celestial heights Jami descends to describe the Princess
Zulaikha’s loveliness with fervent repetition and detail, even to her “chaste fortress and forbidden place.”
Her breasts were orbs of a light most pure,
Twin bubbles new-risen from fount Kafur,
Two young pomegranates grown on one spray,
Where bold hope never a finger might lay.42
She sees Joseph in a dream, and falls in love with him at first seeming; but her father marries her to Potiphar, his vizier. Then she sees Joseph in the flesh, exposed in the market as a slave. She buys him, tempts him, he refuses her advances, she wastes away. The vizier dies; Joseph displaces him and marries Zulaikha; soon both waste away, at last to death. Only the love of God is truth and life.—It is an old tale; but who could sleep over such sermons?
VII. ART IN ASIATIC ISLAM
Through all the reach of Islam, from Granada to Delhi and Samarkand, kings and nobles used geniuses and slaves to raise mosques and mausoleums, to paint and fire tiles, to weave and dye silks and rugs, to beat metal and carve wood and ivory, to illuminate manuscripts with liquid color and line. The Il-Khans, the Timurids, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, even the petty dynasties that ruled the frailer fragments of Islam, maintained the Oriental tradition of tempering pillage with poetry, and assassination with art. In rural villages and urban palaces wealth graduated into beauty, and a fortunate few enjoyed the nearness of things tempting to the touch or fair to see.