The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The victorious boyars proclaimed Shuiski Czar Vasili IV. He bound himself to put no man to death, to confiscate no property, without consent of the Duma—the assembly of boyars; and he solemnly vowed, in the Uspenski Cathedral, “that ill shall unto no man be done without the Council”—i.e., the Zemski Sobor, or assembly of all classes. These guarantees, though often violated, formed a historic step in the evolution of the Russian government.

  They failed to appease those large elements of the population that mourned the deposition of Dmitri. A rebellion broke out in the north; a second False Dmitri was set up as its leader, and Sigismund III of Poland gave him unofficial support. Shuiski solicited the aid of Sigismund’s enemy, Charles IX of Sweden; Charles sent a Swedish force into Russia; Sigismund declared war upon Russia; his general Zolkiewski took Moscow. Shuiski was deposed (1610), was carried off to Warsaw, and was forced to become a monk. A faction of the boyars agreed to recognize Sigismund’s fourteen-year-old son Ladislas as czar, on condition that the independence of the Orthodox Church be maintained and that the Polish army help the nobles to suppress the social revolt that was threatening aristocratic government in Russia.

  The revolt was first of all a religious and patriotic repudiation of a Polish czar. Hermogenes, Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, forbade the people to swear allegiance to a Roman Catholic sovereign. The Poles arrested him; he soon died in his cell, but his proclamation made Ladislas’ rule impossible. Religious leaders called upon the people to drive out the Poles as Roman Catholic heretics. Government seemed to dissolve, and Russia fell into turmoil. A Swedish army held Novgorod and proposed a Swedish prince for the Russian throne. Peasants in the north and the south, Cossacks in the south, repudiated Ladislas and set up their own rule in the provinces. Bands of brigands pillaged villages and towns and tortured all who resisted. Agriculture was disrupted, food production fell, transportation was hazardous, famine rose, and in some districts the population resorted to eating human flesh.52 A rebel mob entered Moscow, and in the confusion most of the city was burned to the ground (March 19, 1611). The Polish garrison retreated into the Kremlin and waited in vain for Sigismund to come to its support.

  At Nizhni Novgorod a butcher, Kosma Minin, organized another rebel army, inspired by Orthodox devotion. He called upon each family to give up a third of its possessions to finance an advance upon the capital; it was done. But the people would follow only a titled leader. Minin invited Prince Dmitri Pozharski to serve as their general. He consented, and the new army marched upon Moscow, fasting and praying. Arrived, they laid siege to the Polish garrison in the Kremlin. It held out till it was reduced to eating rats and men and boiling Greek manuscripts for broth; then (October 22, 1612) it surrendered and fled. That year was long celebrated in Russian memory as the year of liberation, and when, two centuries later, the French were driven from Moscow, the victorious Russians set up in their again incinerated capital a monument to Minin and Pozharski, the butcher and the prince who had set them so heroic an example in 1612.

  Pozharski and Prince Dmitri Troubetskoy invited lay and ecclesiastical representatives from all regions of the empire to a council for the election of a new ruler. Various boyar families pulled various wires; finally the Romanovs prevailed; the council chose Michael Romanov, then only fifteen, and the Moscow populace, quickly gathered and quickly coached, acclaimed him Czar (February 21, 1613). The people, having saved the state, humbly returned it to the nobility.

  The new government suppressed social disorder and revolt, confirmed and extended serfdom, pacified Sweden by ceding Ingria, and signed a fourteen-year truce with Poland. The truce freed from long captivity Michael’s father, Feodor Romanov, whom Boris had forced to become the monk Philaret. Michael made him Patriarch of Moscow, and welcomed him as a councilor so powerful that the people called Philaret “the Second Czar.” Under the combined rule of father and son, despite more uprisings and wars, Russia achieved, after a generation of turmoil, an unsteady and discontented peace. The Time of Troubles (Smutnoe Vremia), which had begun with Boris’ death, ended with Michael’s accession; and this in turn began the Romanov dynasty, which was to rule Russia till 1917.

  CHAPTER XX

  The Islamic Challenge

  1566–1648

  I. THE TURKS

  AMID the internal conflicts of Christendom, political or theological, some thoughtful men were disturbed by the apparent neutrality with which Providence looked upon the greater contest between Christianity and Mohammedanism. That faith had been driven from Spain, but Darul-Islam (“the world of Islam”) was still immense. It included Indonesia and northern India; indeed, this was the age of the brilliant Mohammedan Mogul dynasty at Delhi (1526–1707). It embraced Afghanistan, much of Central Asia, and all of Iran, where in this period Persian art would display its sunset glory. West of Persia the Islamic realm was the Ottoman or Turkish Empire, then rivaled in extent only by the empire of Spain. It kept in its grasp all the coasts of the Black Sea, controlled the mouths of the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Dniester, and helped its allies, the Tatar khans, to control the Crimea and the mouth of the Don. It took in Armenia, Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia—all the Near East. There it held the most famous cities of the ancient and medieval world: Babylon, Nineveh, Baghdad, Damascus, Antioch, Tarsus, Smyrna (İzmir), Nicaea (İznik), Mecca, and Jerusalem, where by Moslem permission Christians worshiped at the tomb of Christ. In the eastern Mediterranean it secured the great islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete. North Africa was overwhelmingly Moslem, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic: Egypt was governed by pashas appointed by the sultans; Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were ruled by local Mohammedan dynasties whose submission to the sultans varied inversely with their distance from Constantinople. This was the age of the Saadian dynasty (1550–1668) in Morocco, when its capital, Marrakech, hummed with commerce and shone with art. In Europe the Ottoman power extended from the Bosporus through Hellas (usually including Athens and Sparta), the Balkans, and Hungary to within a hundred miles of Vienna; through Dalmatia to the gates of Venice; through Bosnia and Albania to just a leap across the Adriatic into papal Italy. There, and at besieged Vienna, the great debate was not between Protestants and Catholics, but between Christianity and Islam. Within that Moslem cordon Christendom lived its divided life.

  No matter how far west Islam reached, it remained Oriental. Constantinople was a window on Europe, but Ottoman roots stretched too far back into Asia to let proud Turkey ape the West. In some parts of Islam the heat of the desert or the tropics burned out the vital spirits; the uninhabited distances discouraged commerce; men could not bestir themselves so acquisitively as the West Europeans; they cultivated immobility and were more readily content. The unchanging crafts of Islam were exquisite, but required time and taste and did not lend themselves to large-scale industry. The caravans were patient, but they could not compete with the commercial fleets of Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands, which used all-water routes to India; however, some ports on the Mediterranean, like Smyrna, prospered from the transfer of goods between ships and caravans. The Mohammedan religion inspired men to hopeful bravery in war, but to an enervating fatalism in peace; it lulled them with dervish dances and mystic dreams; and though it had in its youth allowed great science, it had now frightened philosophy into a scholasticism of barren pedantry. The ulema—the scholar-theologians who wrote the laws on the basis of the Koran—formed the children in faithful orthodoxy, and saw to it that no Age of Reason should raise its head in Islam. There the conflict between religion and philosophy gave religion a decisive victory.

  Moreover, that religion made easy conquests in lands won from Christendom. In Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria the Eastern Christian Church still had patriarchs, but the Christian population was rapidly diminishing. In Asia Minor the Armenians and in Egypt the Copts remained Christian, but generally in Asia, Africa, and the Balkans the masses had gone over to Mohammedanism. Probably the reasons were practical: if they remained Ch
ristian they were excluded from public office, they paid a substantial tax in lieu of military service, and of every ten children they had to surrender a son to be reared as a Moslem Janissary for the army or the bureaucracy.

  Otherwise the Christians in Islam enjoyed a religious toleration such as no Christian ruler would have dreamed of according to Mohammedans in Christian states. At Smyrna, for example, the Moslems had fifteen mosques, the Christians seven churches, the Jews seven synagogues.1 In Turkey and the Balkans the Greek Orthodox Church was protected by Turkish authorities from any molestation in their worship.2 Pepys thought that most of Hungary yielded to the Turks because it had more religious liberty under Ottoman rule than under the Catholic emperors.3 This was certainly true of heterodox Christians. “The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania, and the Unitarians of the latter country,” reported Sir Thomas Arnold, “preferred to submit to the Turks rather than fall into the hands of the fanatical House of Hapsburg,” and “the Protestants of Silesia looked with longing upon Turkey, and would gladly have purchased religious freedom at the price of submission to Muslim rule.”4 More striking still is the judgment of the leading Christian authority on the history of modern Greece:

  Many Greeks of high talent and moral character were so sensible of the superiority of the Mohammedans that, even when they escaped being drafted into the sultan’s household as tribute children, they voluntarily embraced the faith of Mahomet. The moral superiority of Ottoman society must be allowed to have had as much weight in causing these conversions … as the personal ambition of individuals.5

  This “moral superiority” of the seventeenth-century Ottomans is difficult to assess. Tavernier, who traveled and traded in Moslem lands in 1631–33, 1638–43, and later, reported, “Turkey is full of thieves, that keep in troops together, and waylay merchants on the road.”6 The Turks were known for their calm benevolence, but the same religion that tamed their unsocial impulses in peace released them violently in war with “infidels.” The enslavement of captured Christians was sanctioned, and there were slave-capturing raids by Turks on Christian lands near Ottoman frontiers;7 however, in number and cruelty the Turkish trade in slaves lagged far behind the Christian slave raids in Negro Africa. Sexual indulgence was apparently more abundant and enervating in Islam than in Christendom, though it was usually kept within the orderly limits of polygamy. Turkish society was almost exclusively male, and since there was no permitted association of men with women outside the home, the Moslems found companionship in homosexual relationships, platonic or physical. Lesbianism flourished in the zenana.8

  Among a large minority there was an active though circumscribed intellectual life. Literacy was probably higher in European Turkey, in the seventeenth century, than in Christendom. We may judge the abundance of the literature from a bibliography that Hajji Khalfah compiled (1648) of over 25,000 books in the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. Hundreds of volumes were available on theology, jurisprudence, science, medicine, rhetoric, biography, and history.9 Prominent among the historians was Ahmed ibn Muhammad, whose History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain has often buttressed our story; we have known him chiefly as al-Maqqari, so named from his native village in Algeria. Most of his book is made up of passages transcribed or abridged from earlier narratives, yet it is a remarkable production for its time, giving an account not merely of politics and war, but of morals, law, women, music, literature, and medicine, and bringing the record to life with vivid details and humanizing anecdotes.

  Nearly every literate Turk wrote poetry, and (as in Japan) the rulers competed zealously in the game. Mehmet Suleiman Oglou, more melodiously known as Fuzuli, composed the finest love lyrics of the age; they sound silly in the poor translation available in English, but we catch his meaning—that the young women of Baghdad were warm and soft and smooth to the touch, timid and tender till yoked. Mahmud Abdu’l Baqi (d. 1600), greatest of Ottoman lyric poets, after being the favorite singer of Suleiman the Magnificent, continued to warble for thirty-four years after his patron’s death. Nefi of Erzurum (d. 1635) wrote satires with a sting, one of which must have reached Allah, for while Murad IV was reading it a thunderbolt fell at the royal feet; so the Sultan tore up the volume and banished the poet from Constantinople. He was soon recalled; but another satire pricked Vizier Beyram Pasha, who had him beheaded.10

  Ottoman art still produced masterpieces. The Mosque of Ahmed I rose in 1610 to dominate the capital with its six soaring minarets, its succession of swelling domes, the massive fluted columns of its interior, its mosaic arches, lordly script, and shining ornament. Five years later Ahmed dedicated to his favorite wife the lovely Yeni-Validé-Jamissi Mosque. Two majestic mosques were added to Damascus in this period; and in Adrianople the unrivaled architect Sinan, who had designed the Mosque of Suleiman, built for Selim II a temple that some rank higher than any in Constantinople.

  No civilization has surpassed Islam in the making of artistic tiles. See, for example, those in the Mosque of Ahmed I, or, still more beautiful, those that adorn the entrance to the mausoleum of Selim II, near St. Sophia’s: bouquets of white and blue flowers in a field of green, blue, and red sprays and foliage; living flowers could not be fairer, and might envy this permanence. In this age İznik—where, thirteen centuries back, Constantine had presided over the historic council that fixed the Christian creed—was famous for its lustered tiles; there are convincing samples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Miniature painting in Turkey echoed that of Persia, which we shall look at presently. Calligraphy was in so high repute (story had it that a line of handwriting by Mir Imad was sold for a gold piece even in his lifetime)11 that no book was printed in Turkey before 1728. In textiles too the Turks were pupils of the Persians, but they yielded to no others in excellence. Turkish rugs were not quite as delicate in texture, intricate in design, or rich in color as the Persian, but they stand high in the history of this art. Already in the fifteenth century Turkish rugs had won renown in the West, for we see them in the paintings of Mantegna, and later in Pinturicchio, Paris Bordone, and Holbein. Many Tudor mansions were carpeted with Turkish rugs; even the hardy Cromwell had twenty-two;12 and we find them represented in the Gobelin tapestries illustrating the life of Louis XIV. The West was learning that the East had arts as well as guns.

  II. LEPANTO

  The rulers of the West, however, had to watch the guns, for Ottoman sultans had announced their intention of making all Europe Moslem. The manpower and the wealth of their sprawling realm gave them the largest and best-equipped army in Europe. The Janissaries alone numbered over fifty thousand. Perhaps the salvation of the West, and of Christianity, lay in the very vastness of the Ottoman Empire; distances were too great to bring the scattered resources to a point. And the sultans, though they constituted a more enduring dynasty (1288–1922) than any Christian ruling family, were deteriorating through the opportunities of the harem, and were delegating their government to transitory viziers whose insecurity tempted them to cushion their fall by feathering their nests.

  So Selim II, who succeeded Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566, was a dissolute idler, whose one stroke of genius lay in entrusting both administration and policy to his able vizier, Mohammed Sokolli. The Turkish assaults upon the Holy Roman Empire were interrupted; Emperor Maximilian II bought peace with an annual tribute of thirty thousand ducats, and Sokolli turned to nearer game. Arabia had preserved its independence religiously, but now (1570) it was conquered for the Porte. The Aegean Sea was still dotted with Venetian possessions hampering Turkish fleets and trade; Lala Mustafa was sent against Cyprus with sixty thousand men. Venice appealed to the Christian powers for help; only the Pope and Spain responded. Pius V had not forgotten that in 1566 a Turkish fleet had threatened Ancona, the papal port and fortress on the Adriatic. Philip II knew that the Moors of Spain, suffering under his blows, had appealed to the Sultan for help (1569), and that their embassy had been favorably received. The diplomatic situation was illuminating. The
Emperor would not join in war against Turkey, for he had just signed a treaty of peace and could not honorably or safely break it. France opposed any plan that would raise the power or prestige of Spain, and she cultivated the friendship of the Turks as an aid against the Emperor. England feared that a common enterprise with Philip would leave her at the mercy of Catholic Spain in case of victory. Venice worried lest victory bring Spanish power into the Adriatic and end Venetian monopoly of that sea. Pius labored for a year to overcome these hesitations; he had to consent to the use of ecclesiastical revenues by Venice and Spain; finally (May 20, 1571) the three powers joined in a Holy League and prepared for war.

  During these negotiations the Turkish attack upon Cyprus had proceeded with great losses on both sides. Nicosia was taken after a siege of forty-five days; twenty thousand of its inhabitants were put to the sword. Famagusta resisted for almost a year; when it fell (August 6, 1571) its heroic defender, Marcantonio Bragadino, was flayed alive, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was sent to Constantinople as a trophy.

  So prodded, the Holy League gathered its forces. Savoy, Florence, Parma, Lucca, Ferrara, Urbino, and Venice’s old enemy, Genoa, contributed vessels and men. At Naples Don Juan of Austria received the admiral’s flag in solemn ceremony from Cardinal de Granvelle. On September 16, after the sailors and soldiers had been given the Eucharist by the Jesuits and Capuchins who were attached to the expedition, the armada sailed from Messina past the toe and heel of Italy across the Strait of Otranto to the island of Corfu. Here the news came of the massacres and atrocities that had attended the fall of Cyprus. The thirst for revenge animated the crews, and shouts of “Vittoria! Vittoria! Viva Cristo!” rose from the fleet as Don Juan gave the order to advance to battle.