Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire

by Mehrdad Kia

  The rules of the game were strictly observed, and unfair or unnecessary moves that were construed as rough and violent were not permitted. To strike the horse, instead of the rider, was regarded as a sign of inexperience and violated the most basic rules of the game. Highly trained players rarely missed hitting an opponent and were skilled at avoiding hits themselves by performing special moves on horseback, such as leaning towards either side of the horse, under the horse’s stomach or even its neck. Some players scored more points by hitting an opponent three or four times before he managed to escape and take his place back in his row. All these moves and maneuvers meant that the participants in the game faced a considerable risk of serious injury and even death, since the head was one of the principal targets of attack. Part of the necessary skill lay in training the horses to play a significant role in the outcome of the game. A player won points when he managed to hit his rival with the wooden javelin or rode him out or caught an incoming cereed in mid-air. He received negative points for any move that endangered the horse, such as riding out of bounds or striking a horse with the cereed intentionally. During the mock battle, cereed horsemen tried “to gain possession of the darts thrown earlier in the game and carried for this purpose thin canes curved at one end.” Throughout a game of cereed, as horsemen galloped on the field, musicians played Ottoman military songs or folk songs performed with bass drum and reed windpipes. At the end of the game, the referees counted the number of hits and announced the victorious team, which received awards and a banquet in its honor.

  As intrepid horsemen and skilled archers, the Ottomans, who brought the war game to Anatolia, used cereed as a means of improving the equestrian skills of their troops and training their army units for battle. While marching, an Ottoman commander lined up his officers and conscripts against one another to play 40 to 50 rounds of cereed in order to prepare them for the next military campaign. The exercise stopped as soon as it was decided that the horses were tiring. Ultimately, a specialized cavalry unit was organized from those who excelled in the sport.

  Numerous cereed grounds sprang up throughout Istanbul and the surrounding suburbs. The best known among these were the Archery Field, where the sultan himself played both polo and cereed; the field at the Imperial Arsenal; and the field in Cindi Meydan, where the monarch and the court played every Friday. One European observer wrote that near “the Hippodrome” (At Meydani), there was a large sports ground surrounded by walls where horsemen met on Friday afternoons, holidays, and every day during the summer to play cereed. The game allowed the ruler and the palace pages to show off their physical prowess and dexterity. In Istanbul, large numbers of court officials, dignitaries, and palace employees played the game regularly, and “rival factions existed under the name of Lahanadjil (cabbage men) and Bamyadil (gumbo men).”

  Cereed was not, however, confined to Istanbul. In every province where Ottoman troops were stationed, the game was played with great intensity and enthusiasm. During the Ramazan Bayrami, which celebrated the end of the month of fasting, cereed and wrestling were the most popular spectator sports. In villages across Anatolia, teams of horsemen and javelin throwers contested, as spectators peered through the dust of the flying hooves and cheered the men on horseback.

  In Egypt, cereed was played initially by the local Mamluk elite and the Ottoman soldiers and officers who were stationed in the country. The Egyptian peasants, however, soon learned the game and played it regularly during the wedding ceremonies of an important person, such as the sheikh of a tribe or village, or when a boy was circumcised, or when “a votive calf, or ox or bull” was “to be sacrificed at the tomb of a saint and a public feast.” On these occasions, the cereed players, usually representing rival villages or tribes, gathered and were immediately divided into two contending teams. Each team comprised 12 to 20 combatants with each individual mounted on a horse.

  The Atmeidan (At Meydan) or Hippodrome. William H. Bartlett. From Julie Pardoe, The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London: 1839).

  ARCHERY

  Besides cereed, archery was viewed as the most important sport in the Ottoman domains. The Turks were master archers from the time they emerged as a distinct people in Central Asia. While the sword was used as the close-range weapon, a bow and arrow remained the standard long-range weapon. The use of the bow and arrow continued in the Ottoman Empire until the introduction of firearms. Long-distance and target-shooting competitions, as well as archery on horseback, took place under early Ottoman rulers, but not until the reign of Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, was an archery field designed in Istanbul. During the reign of Mehmed II’s successor, Bayezid II, the archery field was expanded and additional ones designed and developed. Bayezid II also offered special privileges to prominent archers and the craftsmen who manufactured archery equipments. These artisans were provided with shops in a designated section of the bazaar. During the 15th and 16th centuries, there were roughly five hundred bow and arrow manufacturers in Istanbul.

  During the Ramazan Bayrami, crowds of spectators assembled on the plain above Beyoğlu—a district located on the European side of Istanbul, separated from the old city by the Golden Horn—to watch archery competitions. First, the archers sat cross-legged in a long line and chanted the prayers with which Ottomans began all competitions and games. Then the competition began in complete silence as men used short stiff bows and special arrows to shoot a target in the fastest possible time. The prize for this competition was an embroidered towel, which the champion could use for cleaning and wiping his face. The distance competition then followed, and the spot where the longest shot had landed was marked by a stone. If a record was broken, a marble monument with the name of the archer inscribed on it in golden letters was erected. Archers who set a new record were recognized as champions and received special gifts and awards from the sultan. During the competition, the archers also exhibited their skills by targeting small objects such as apples, bottles, and lanterns. The diplomat and author Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1521–1592), who served as the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire for the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand I (and later the future Holy Roman emperor), “marveled at the length of shots he witnessed, but he noticed that the marking-stones from former times lay far beyond those of his day, and the Turks told him that they could not equal their forefathers’ strength and skill.”

  Prominent archers of the day met regularly at designated locations to offer free lessons and display their extraordinary talent and brilliance. Several Ottoman sultans, such as Murad IV, practiced archery a few times a week and went so far as to compete in various archery competitions, in which they set new records that were celebrated by the construction of a marble column. The targets set up in numerous streets of the capital where young and old came to practice archery demonstrated the great enthusiasm of ordinary people for this sport.

  Archery remained a passion of Ottoman sultans down to the 19th century. Sultan Mahmud II, who was an avid archer, competed regularly with his favorite officials. After the sultan had shot his arrows, imperial pages and attendants ran to the field to collect the arrows and measure the distances. Once the boys had completed their task, court officials, who had been standing and waiting in a line, took their turn and shot their arrows, “taking special care to keep within bounds” and not to outdo and outshine their royal master. The court-sponsored archery competitions were so frequent that “a long stretch of hilly country immediately in the rear” of Istanbul’s Military College had become “dotted over with marble pillars fancifully carved, and carefully inscribed, erected on the spots where the arrows shot” by the sultan “from a terrace on the crest of the height had fallen.”

  Archery and cereed went hand in hand with other war-related games, such as horseback riding, hunting, swordplay, fencing, spear throwing, putting the stone or throwing the boulder, and the game of wielding a mace (gurz), a heavy spiked club whose handling required strong arms. All these activities were directly connected to military training and
battlefield performance.

  WRESTLING

  One sport not directly related to warfare was wrestling, which was enormously popular among most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, particularly the Turks, Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Kurds, and Gypsies. Every village and town had its own wrestling champion, or pehlivan. Matches were organized on Fridays, or during bayrams, between the champions of neighboring villages. Large crowds of cheering spectators watched the wrestlers for hours, cheering both the victors and the vanquished. During major festivals in Istanbul, thousands of spectators, including the sultan and the court, attended the wrestling matches between the city’s best-known wrestlers. Süleyman the Magnificent greatly enjoyed the sport and sponsored his own strongly built wrestlers, who received a daily wage. These wrestlers were mostly Moors, Indians, and Tatars, and they wore a pair of leather breeches, gathered tightly below the knee. They often oiled their bodies to make it extremely difficult for the opponent to get a grip. After the end of each bout, “the wrestlers wrapped their sweaty bodies in a blue-checked cotton cloth, but away from the ring they wore long gowns girdled with silk and a bonnet of black velvet or astrakhan, which hung down over one shoulder similar to the bonnets of Polish and Georgian gentlemen.”

  Some sultans, such as Murad IV, were wrestlers themselves. In his Book of Travels, Evliya Çelebi wrote that Murad IV frequently stripped and wrestled his court officials, including the sword bearer, Melek Ahmed Paşa; the calligrapher, Deli Husayin Paşa; and the champion, Pehlivan Dişlenk Süleyman, who were all very athletic and fond of wrestling. These royal bouts were held inside the palace, and before each match a prescribed prayer was recited: “Allah! Allah! For the sake of the Lord of all Created beings Muhammad Mustafa; for the sake of Muhammad Bukhara Sari-Saltuk; for the sake of our Sheikh Muhammad who laid hold of the garments and limbs—let there be a laying of hand upon hand, back upon back, chest upon chest! For the Love of Ali, the Lion of God, grant assistance, O Lord!” After this prayer the challengers began to wrestle. When the sultan grew angry, he knelt down upon one knee and tried to lift his opponent from beneath.

  Murad IV was so infatuated with wrestling and displaying his strength that, at times, he boasted of his strength by lifting the pages of his court over his head and swinging them in the air:

  One day he came out covered with perspiration from the hammam (bath) in the Khasoda, saluted those present, and said “Now I have had a bath.” . . . I said, “My emperor, you are now clean and comfortable, do not therefore oil yourself for wrestling today, especially as you have already exerted yourself with others, and your strength must be considerably reduced.” “Have I no strength left?” Said he, “let us see;” upon which he seized me as an eagle, by my belt, raised me over his head, and whirled me about as children do a top. I exclaimed, “Do not let me fall, my emperor, hold me fast!” He said, “Hold fast yourself,” and continued to swing me round, until I cried out, “For God’s sake, my emperor, cease, for I am quite giddy.” He then began to laugh, released me, and gave me forty eight pieces of gold for the amusement I had afforded him.

  To become a wrestler, one had to attend special schools called tekkes, which combined athletic and spiritual training under one roof. The tekkes were modeled after zurkhanehs (houses of strength), a traditional Iranian gymnasium. Here, athletes, who exercised to build a strong body, also learned the philosophical and spiritual principles of mysticism (Sufism), such as purity of heart, selflessness, compassion, humility, and respect toward fellow human beings. They were also taught that abstinence from sex and bodily indulgence preserved their physical strength. A true pehlivan was not only a man of muscles and physical strength, but also a spiritual being with unique and distinct personal and ethical qualities. These included grace and humility, particularly when he defeated a challenger. If a younger athlete defeated an older wrestler, for example, he kissed the hand of the defeated man as a sign of respect and humility.

  Kirkpinar, on the outskirts of Edirne, was the first site of Ottoman wrestling competition. The area also served as a hunting ground for Ottoman sultans. The first Kirkpinar wrestling tournament was probably held in 1360/1361, during the reigns of the Ottoman sultans Orhan and Murad I. Today, yagli güresh, or oil wrestling— where young men compete in leather shorts, their bodies shiny and slippery with oil—remains one of Turkey’s most popular national sports. As in Anatolia and parts of the Balkans, in Egypt too, men stripped themselves of all their clothing except their drawers and oiled their bodies before they entangled in a wrestling match. These matches were particularly popular after important processions and during various festivals.

  Another nonmilitary sport was the game of matrak, in which balls were struck with wooden clubs/sticks that were covered with leather and looked like bowling ten-pins. The tops of the clubs were rounded and slightly wider than the body. The game was a kind of battle animation, and it was considered a lawn game. Throwing heavy stones or boulders was another popular sport that survived until the end of the empire. The sport involved throwing in a pushing motion a heavy stone or rock as far as possible. The game was alluded to in various Greek folk songs, “which recounted the exploits of brigand bands.”

  Among the more sedentary and less physically demanding games that remained popular throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire were chess, backgammon, checkers (draughts), and cards. All these games were popular among men who spent much of their time in coffeehouses. With the increasing Westernization of the empire in the 19th century, a host of new and competing European sports such as soccer (football), tennis, rugby, cycling, swimming, gymnastics, croquet, boxing, and cricket were introduced. In Izmir in 1890, a soccer and rugby club was organized, and in the winter of 1908–1909, an Ottoman army officer, who had studied the impact of sports on the youth, embarked on a campaign to educate the urban population on the benefits of physical exercise. He organized several modern sport clubs. In Izmir, an athletic club began to hold Pannonian Games, which included aquatic sports as well as soccer, cricket, tennis, and fencing. Horseracing and hunting clubs also appealed to the Ottoman love for traditional sports, and they sprang up in Istanbul where race courses, mimicking those of France and England, were built by the government. Among the imported sports to catch on, soccer was the most successful, while games such as tennis remained confined to the four walls of the imperial palace.

  Wrestling match, 19th century. Anonymous.

  13 - SICKNESS, DEATH, AND DYING

  Death was a common occurrence throughout the Ottoman Empire. As in other pre-industrial societies, most deaths in the cities, towns, and villages of the Ottoman Empire “were deaths of children.” Children “were particularly susceptible to the intestinal diseases, such as dysentery and giardia,” and the “most common killers of young children, from birth to age five, were diseases of the intestines and the pulmonary system.” “Measles and smallpox” were also “common causes of death among children.” Among the young adults living in the urban centers of the empire, “the most common cause of death” was tuberculosis. According to one source, “one-third to one-half of the recorded deaths of young adults in Istanbul at the end of the 19th century were from tuberculosis and its complications.” Typhoid also “killed as many as did smallpox, approximately 5 per cent of the young adult deaths were caused by each.”

  In the rural regions of the empire, the principal causes of death were malnutrition and lack of access to clean water. A population whose diet was “primarily made up of carbohydrates, with few vegetables, fewer fruits, and limited protein, were naturally susceptible to disease.” Water was the principal carrier of many diseases, and “ignorance of the nature of the disease was in itself” one of the most important “causes of death.”

  Plagues frequently killed thousands of people in a short span of time. Until the second half of the 19th century, plague was endemic and virulent in Istanbul and other urban centers of the empire. Called “veba in Turkish, the Arabic waba, ‘to be contaminated,’ th
e lethal illness known simply as ‘plague’ usually” referred to “bubonic plague, also known in the West as the Black Plague or the Black Death.” Pandemic “throughout the empire from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century, plague was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis and was usually transmitted by means of rodents infested with infected fleas.” Although “the disease was endemic, meaning that it was both geographically widespread and constantly present at some level in the population, periodic epidemic outbreaks of great virulence frequently resulted in a 75 percent mortality rate among those affected.” For “this reason, plague was greatly feared by Ottoman subjects and by the foreign travelers who frequented the empire.” The disease “spread along trade routes and the paths of pilgrims to and from Mecca.” As the majority of pilgrims came from Anatolia and the Arab provinces, regions such as “Western Anatolia, Egypt, and northern Syria reported plague epidemics most often.” When a plague struck, people fled from the cities and towns to the countryside.