Djem frowned at him, and pointed. “You will serve my guns, young Hawk. Put any thought of treason towards me from your mind. You will serve my guns, or you will watch your wife and children die. Think on that at all times.”
*
The Golden Horn and the Bosphorus were shrouded in doleful sounds.
Anthony Hawkwood remembered how, when he had first come to Constantinople, as a boy of sixteen following his father’s dream of military renown, he had listened to the tolling of the bells of St Sophia as the Genoese carrack had slowly breasted the current pouring out of the Black Sea into Marmara, telling the whole world that the Christian host commanded by Janos Hunyadi had been annihilated.
Those bells had long been silent; St Sophia had been converted, by command of the Sultan, into a mosque.
Bells were not the Muslim way. This day the air was filled with the sound of cymbals and tambourines, tabalcans and kettle drums, each giving forth a steady, mournful cadence — as they had done for the last month. No doubt any ship approaching the city by way of Marmara would be similarly forewarned of disaster.
The Sultan was dead! It was difficult for anyone in Constantinople, anyone in all the domains ruled by the Ottomans to understand the true enormity of what had happened.
No doubt, in Rome, His Holiness the Pope, Sixtus IV, would hold a Te Deum and celebrate the death of the devil.
For Anthony Hawkwood it was more difficult to believe than for most. He sometimes thought that his life had only truly begun when he had stood before that slight, boyish figure thirty years before. Mahomet II had been his destiny in every possible way. The Sultan had stood sponsor for his circumcision, had presented him with both his wives, had given him high command in the army.
Together they had assaulted the world. The taking of Constantinople had been no more than a first step. With Hawk Pasha to command his guns, Mahomet had then embarked upon that career which had truly earned him the soubriquet of “Conqueror”. Only Belgrade, valiantly relieved by the ageing Hunyadi, and the island of Rhodes, equally valiantly defended by the Knights of St John, had withstood his arms. All of Serbia except the White City had fallen beneath the Ottoman yoke, the Morea had been overrun, the Black Sea coast and the Empire of Trebizond had been absorbed, Bosnia and Herzegovina had collapsed.
The price of these unceasing conquests had been the enmity of Venice, whose benevolent neutrality had been so helpful in the campaign against Constantinople. The Venetians had grown anxious at the spread of Turkish power, and angry at Turkish interference in their lucrative Levant trade.
The Venetians never did things by halves. It was their ambition to destroy the Ottomans once and for all time. They enlisted the support of the Pope to preach a crusade against the anti-Christ, the Drinker of Blood, and they even sent emissaries into far-off Persia to summon to arms Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Akkoyunlu, who as Shi’ites abhorred the more orthodox Muslim Sunnites such as the Turks, the followers of the traditional way.
Mahomet had defeated them all. The so-called crusade had been scattered; the Venetians, attacked by a Turkish fleet in their very lagoon, had been reduced to paying tribute; and only two years ago Hasan’s great army had been shattered at the battle of Otluk-Beli, on the Upper Euphrates.
Mahomet had stood astride the world from Italy to the Taurus, master of all he surveyed.
And surely with many more years of conquest ahead of him, as he was in no more than early middle age. Only a month before, he had sent his heralds to summon his Janissaries, his Anatolians, his sipahis and his bashi-bazouks to arms, to launch another campaign against the Shi’ite Persians and crush the heretics forever.
Two days later the Sultan was dead.
*
Anthony Hawkwood had been one of those kneeling by Mahomet’s side when he died. This was fitting, as he was perhaps the dead Sultan’s closest friend. Now he took the ferry across the Golden Horn from his home in the suburb of Galeta to attend the person of the new Sultan, Bayazid.
Like his father, Bayazid was the second of his name. His previous namesake had called himself “the Thunderer”, and pretended to be the greatest soldier in the world; but he had been crushed out of existence by Timur the Mongol. For those who prospered by the greatness of the Ottomans, as did Anthony Hawkwood, it was fervently to be hoped that this young man of thirty-four would prove himself to be the true son of his father rather than a replica of the first Bayazid. Mahomet had called himself nothing — he had left the nicknames to those who feared him — yet had indeed proved himself the greatest warrior of his time.
Bayazid had much to live up to — more than just his father’s conquests. Mahomet had been the first Emir of the Ottomans to call himself Sultan. The title had been used in the Koran to denote a person of moral or religious authority. In this form it had, some centuries later, been adopted by political leaders as well, to suggest that their authority was both physical and approved by God; the first so to use the title in this sense had been Mahmud Ghazni, greatest soldier of the eleventh Christian century.
The caliphs of Baghdad had taken up bestowing the title on certain other prominent Muslim rulers, seeking to bolster their own declining authority with the distribution of honours. The forerunners of the Ottomans, their kindred people the Seljuks, who had first waged successful war on the Byzantines, had had their sultans. But it was not the Caliph who had granted this title to the Emir Mahomet II: he had claimed it himself, and by his victories had forced the world to recognise it and do homage to it.
Now, only by right of inheritance, it belonged to his son.
*
Mahomet had been more than a mere soldier. No doubt he had spent too much of his time campaigning to properly achieve everything else he had wished to achieve; but, then, he had not expected to die so soon. Perhaps he had left too much to be accomplished in his declining years, when campaigning could be left to others.
He had sought to rebuild Constantinople, without much success. As Anthony Hawkwood and his sons disembarked from the ferry and entered the water gate, though the walls to either side had been largely repaired from the battering they had received from the Ottoman artillery twenty-eight years before, they could see that great portions of the city were still tangled ruins.
Out of the desolation the monument to Constantine the Great still poked skywards as a last reminder of Christian defiance. Mahomet revered the memories of famous men, and had resisted the importunities of his imams to have the statue destroyed.
Where he had built, the Sultan had built well. The palace of the Paleologi had been transformed from a gloomy edifice of sharp angles and dark rooms into a magnificent mansion of airy apartments and flowing curves, with the constant, soothing trickle of running water everywhere to be heard. Gone were the no-less gloomy ikons which had hung from every wall; not only was any reproduction of the human form against the Muslim law, it was also repulsive to their sense of beauty. In the place of the Virgin and child were silken drapes in the softest of colours.
Mahomet’s pashas had emulated their master, and Hawkwood’s own palace, in Galata suburb, was a smaller reflection of the Seraglio, as the Sultan’s palace was known.
There was one custom Mahomet had perpetuated, a part of the Muslim tradition; a man’s wealth and power was indicated by the reputed beauty of his wives and the number of his concubines. In this alone was Anthony Hawkwood not pre-eminent.
Mahomet had dreamed of turning Constantinople into a purely Muslim city. But the Turks were not city-dwellers by nature or habit. While Mahomet’s pashas had somewhat unwillingly followed him behind the walls of Theodosius, and endeavoured to make their homes there, the rank and file had preferred to return to their farms. Nor were the Turks clerks or merchants; they were horsemen from the steppes, who held that a man’s true place was in the saddle.
Mahomet would thus have found himself in possession of a ghost city, save for the thousands of Greeks, Genoese and Christians of varying denominations who had been gathered into
the market places to await either execution or sale as slaves.
But the Conqueror was nothing if not a pragmatist. He had no intention of seeing this pearl he had plucked from Christendom die. Constantinople needed people. It needed clerks and merchants, entrepreneurs and tradesmen, if it was to preserve its place as the greatest city in the world. All of these people were to hand. What matter if they were gaiours who up till a few short months before had been his bitter enemies?
He had offered his captives their freedom if they would continue living and trading in Constantinople. More, he had found their patriarch, Gennadius, hiding in a monastery, and had reinstated him. The Conqueror had no wish to forcibly convert the Greeks to the one true religion; he preferred that they should remain inferior in every way. But he recognised that every man needed a religion; Gennadius was therefore told to preach to the people and accept their penance, as he had done for so long under the Paleologi.
Gennadius was no less a pragmatist than his new master. He could see no point in playing the martyr when he had been given a Christian duty to perform, albeit at the bidding of a heathen. Close one’s eyes to the banners of the crescent, the measured tread of the Janissaries, the brilliant flowing robes of the sipahis, and Constantinople was again a Byzantine city.
Only St Sophia had been barred to the Greeks for ever.
The transition had not been easy. Hawkwood could still remember the look of shocked horror on the Patriarch’s face when he found himself standing side by side with his bitter enemy, Hawk Pasha, before the divan of the Conqueror. The Greeks, the most turbulent of people, had needed to learn that they were not actually free, and that to strike a Turk meant instant death. Yet Constantinople had been reborn, and beneath the aegis of the crescent was now more prosperous than it had been for five hundred years.
Mahomet had then had to learn how to cope with the administration of so vast a source of wealth. Again, the Turks had no knowledge of — or use for — money; their lives had been governed by barter or plunder. But in dealing with the West, with the bankers of Hamburg and Florence — who would negotiate even with the anti-Christ were he prepared to pay their interest — and indeed, with the everyday taxation of his subject peoples, Mahomet had been forced to accept ledgers and accounts. There was no profit in demanding payment in kind from a Greek merchant on the waterfront of the Golden Horn — but there was a great deal in demanding a tithe of his earnings in gold coin.
Here again it had been necessary to employ Greeks. But the Greeks had their own traditions, their own concept of how things should be done. The Byzantine Empire had been accumulating traditions a thousand years before the first Ottoman had raised his horsehair wand and led his sipahis out of the steppes.
Imperial accountants needed names. The Ottomans had always been nothing more than a huge clan. The Emir had had his viziers who conducted his day-to-day business to save him having to do it for himself; he had had his pashas to command his men and his ships into battles; he had had his beylerbeys to govern the various provinces of the empire. Below them had been little order; each vizier, each pasha, each beylerbey conducted his affairs as he thought best, only always aware that to displease the Emir or misinterpret his will might mean a swift and sudden death.
The Sultan retained all of these, but to them had been added a host of other officials. For the Turks, no less than the Byzantines, had discovered that a title adds to a man’s stature, however falsely. To gain entrance to the divan, even Hawk Pasha must pass scrutiny by the Keeper of the Gate, and then the Keeper of the Door, and then the Captain of the Guard, and then the Keeper of the Inner Chamber, every one dressed in the most resplendent robes, and every one wearing, round his steel helmet, a swathe of cloth.
Thus slavishly did the Ottomans imitate the habits of their master. It had been Mahomet, on his campaigns in the east, who had first wound a strip of cloth round his helmet in order to counter the heat of the sun on exposed metal. Soon every man in his army had adopted the fashion. Now this was regarded as an essential article of dress. Like everyone else, Anthony Hawkwood and his sons also wore the turban.
As he proceeded towards the huge arch which gave access to the divan, guarded by eunuchs armed with the scimitar, Hawkwood could look to his right into another large room, where the Greek scribes laboured at their desks, attempting to keep the financial affairs of the empire up to date. They too had little titles: Keeper of the Books, Keeper of the Accounts, Keeper of the Records.
If he chose to look to his left, through the arched windows, into the Sultan’s gardens, he would see the Head Gardener speaking with the Head Under-Gardener amidst the magnificent, multi-coloured blooms, from jacarandas to roses, which grew in profusion in this perfect climate and which had been the Sultan’s pride and joy.
All of these positions were not only well paid but had already become hereditary. The wild horsemen who had first followed Ertughril out of the steppes must be turning in their graves, Hawkwood thought, to see their descendants so cosseted and debased.
But was he not himself General of the Artillery? And would not his eldest son John succeed him?
Mahomet had allowed these trappings of civilisation to grow because he understood their power to bind men to him. He had always regarded them with cynicism, though; he had not altered his own habits, but had still gone abroad as and when he chose, shown himself readily to his people and even stopped to speak with them. If, as was the Ottoman way, he had allowed his viziers to conduct the business of the divan, he had always been present to one side of the room, ready to interfere as necessary. And he had always ridden at the head of his own armies.
The new Sultan had not been seen in public since his father’s death — and seldom before then, either. It was difficult to imagine him in the saddle, scimitar in hand. Bayazid was no taller than Mahomet had been, but at the age of thirty-four he was already fat. Though he had his father’s cold eyes and cruel lips, his face lacked purpose. In place of determination there were merely sensuality; it was said that he already possessed a harem equal in number to that of his father.
This Hawkwood could believe. He had watched the doleful procession of veiled women, with their attendant eunuchs, filing out of the Seraglio in which most of them had lived since girlhood — now destined for a convent where they would spend the remainder of their lives in cloistered secrecy. In their place had been the procession of Bayazid’s women entering the palace, joyous in their new elevation above the common herd.
Only the Sultan Valideh, the mother of the ruler, spanned the two groups. The mother of the younger prince, Djem, had been dismissed with all the others. But this new Sultan Valideh could be no more than a pale replica of Mara Brankovich, Anthony felt sure. Naturally he had never laid eyes on her.
Djem was the burning question of the moment. Anthony Hawkwood could still remember the brother of Mahomet being strangled by a bowstring held by two Janissaries. All Mahomet’s brothers had perished in the same way. When reproached about this, he had quoted from the Koran: God hates discord worse than murder. Yet to kill one’s own brothers seemed abhorrent to one brought up as a Christian. Thus Anthony had beseeched Bayazid, in the first hours of his succession, to spare the prince’s life.
“Djem is still but a boy, twelve years younger than yourself, O Padishah,” he had said. “Confine him by all means, but do not stain your hands with his blood.”
Bayazid had seemed to agree. “Just let the boy come to me, and accept me as his lord and master,” he had said.
Hawkwood had been forced to accept that decision, even if he knew that were Bayazid truly the son of Mahomet, Djem’s death had already been decided. He could only hope to intervene again when the boy reached the city.
But this urgent summons… Hawkwood studied Bayazid’s face, as he approached the divan, his soft kid boots making no sound upon the polished marble floor. The younger man did not entirely lack virtue. He was a collector of books and, even more than his father, a composer of verses. He showed a
lively interest in the intellectual lives of other countries, even Christian countries. Yet he had been brought up too much in the consciousness of his greatness. He conducted his own divan, so jealous was he of his new prerogative; and he was not surrounded by armed pashas, as Mahomet had always been.
Anthony now gazed at the Chief Armourer, who bore the Sultan’s scimitar in its velvet case; the Chief Huntsman wearing a horn-shaped cap made of cloth of gold; the Overseer of the Sultan’s Perfumes; the Chief Keeper of the Nightingales; and the Custodian of the Heron’s Plumes. Each official’s clothes were studded with precious stones and laced with gold thread; they almost rivalled their master in magnificence. None of them seemed happy to gaze upon the huge, battle-scarred figure of the empire’s most famous living soldier.
“Have you not heard, Hawk Pasha,” demanded the Vizier, “the news from Brusa?”
“Not yet,” Anthony replied.
“We are defied,” said the Chief Armourer. “The Prince Djem refuses to attend our presence in Constantinople.”
“He disputes our master’s claim,” said the Custodian of the Heron’s Plumes.
Anthony looked at the Sultan.
“It was on your advice that I sought to treat fairly with my brother,” Bayazid said. He spoke very softly, in hardly more than a whisper; Hawkwood had never heard him raise his voice. “And this is his reply. He declares that it is only just that the empire should be divided between us. He lays claim to all Asia. He declares his intention of fortifying Brusa and defending it to the last. How may I bury my father if I can gain no access to the Holy City? How may I call myself Sultan while this canker exists in the bowels of my empire?”
“He is a foolish young man, and afraid,” Anthony said.
“Yet he commands an army.”
“A small one, Padishah. And one in which the commanders are no rebels. I chose them myself. Omar Pasha will never take up arms against the Sultan. And William Hawkwood is my very own son. I will send a messenger to Brusa and endeavour to make the prince see sense.”
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