Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  Mehmet did not repair the ruins of Constantine’s Great Palace, or move into the half-fortified Blachernae Palace on the Golden Horn: they were dead men’s shoes, and his power was more than a renovation. Shortly after the completion of the Old Palace in Constantinople in 1458 Mehmet erected a new one, Topkapi, on the promontory on which the Acropolis had stood. While on campaign in Greece he had asked permission to pay a visit to the legendary City of the Wise. With Mehmet’s army only miles away the Athenians asked him in. For three days he studied the defences of the place, all the better to conquer it seven years later; but he also admired the many relics of antiquity, the splendour of the Acropolis, and the principles of its siting.

  The Acropolis in Constantinople had views of the two seas, the waters of the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn. Mehmet had the site stepped and levelled before he began building, taking the advice of Persian princes as well as Italian architects. The sixteenth-century historian Mustafa Ali wrote that ‘the world-raising sultan must build his palace on a site vast as a desert, so that he can show off and boast’, and Topkapi Palace today resembles the petrified encampment of some defeated army. Even in its heyday foreigners seldom saw the point of it exactly: Mustafa Ali’s sixteenth-century contemporary, Salomon Schweigger, complained that the small low buildings looked as if they had fallen out of a bag. It was not as if the Ottomans were incapable of erecting great buildings, as certain visitors myopically or spitefully supposed: across the empire great mosques, medreses, asylums, hospitals, baths, inns and libraries testified to the Turkish talent for achieving symmetry and grandiloquence in stone.

  The palace lacked the sculptural finality of pure architecture. It was a series of enclosures, a ceremonial ordering of space. Visitors, told to wait hours in the second court, perceived that the walls were lined, not with sculptured caryatids, but with living men who never moved a muscle. The experience was almost hallucinatory; certainly unnerving. It was an expression, not merely of wealth, but of will.

  There were three courts. In the first court the business of the palace and the city mixed. The second, scarcely grander than the first, contained the offices of state, the archives and the nearby divan-room where the Sultan’s viziers met, so that documents could be summoned up for consultation without delay. The divan met four times a week; a light pilaff was served for which the Grand Vizier paid. The Sultan would remain aloof, listening, if he so desired, to the vizierial deliberations through a small curtained grille – the Eye of the Sultan – which gave onto his private apartments in the third and most restricted enclosure, the Seraglio, which was approached through the Gate of Felicity. The name Abode of Felicity was not a coy reference to the legions of pretty women who lived there, but signified the sheer happiness of a place honoured by the presence of the Sultan Caliph.

  In the outer courts, Ottoman marriages, circumcisions, and births were celebrated. The heads of traitors were displayed on poles; pay was issued, foreign envoys were received and, when the divan met, messengers and clerks scurried to and fro like medieval electrons. Yet the Sultan was able to impose, at will, moments of silence, and areas of peace. To proceed from court to court was to experience a muffling of sound, from the filtered hurly burly of the outer court, through the gardens and gazelles of the second court, to the quiet of the inner sanctum, where ‘no man speaks unless ordered to, no talking to one another, neither doth any person dare so much as to sneeze or cough’. Here Sultan Suleyman in the 1520s introduced ixarette, the sign language of the deaf and dumb.

  Silence was reinforced by solemnity. The Sultan’s horse, which carried him the short distance through the streets to Friday prayers, was suspended from straps the night before to ensure that it walked with halting gravity. The Sultan was expected to move slowly – which ‘shews something of Majesty’ – in the palace; everyone else, from scullion to Grand Vizier, moved at the double; and in going through the corridors a harem girl who had not been selected for the Sultan’s bed was warned to flee noiselessly from the tap of the Sultan’s silver-studded slippers in the night.*

  George Sandys watched the Friday procession to the mosque at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and he made a rather creepy discovery as the gorgeous cavalade passed by – the Sultan on that unfortunate horse, his viziers riding at a respectful distance behind him, the Sheikh ul-Islam in a great turban, the janissaries in arms, the mounted cavalry, the crowd pressing close to glimpse their Padishah in the flesh. You had only to shut your eyes in the crowd, Sandys says, ‘as had you but onely eares, [and] you might supose (except when they salute him by a soft and short murmur) that men were folded in sleepe, and the World in midnight’.

  The government took the name Sublime Porte, or ‘High Gate’, in the 1650s. Men clustered at the palace gates, and justice was dispensed there; gateways, too, provided each slightly featureless court with a focus towards the next; and whether they opened or remained shut to a man defined his role and status. The same principle operated in the simplest nomadic camp, where a chief could convey rank, perhaps, or disapproval, through ceremony and gesture, in his manner of receiving guests, rising or not, widening the ring of seated guests, or allowing the newcomer to remain standing. By the end of the sixteenth century foreign ambassadors given an audience with the Sultan were frogmarched by officials to the foot of the throne, and conducted their entire interview with their arms pinned to their sides: not, as some thought, because the Sultan feared assassination, but to preserve the stranger from collapse.

  The palace in motion expressed, by repetition, a universal and transcendent order. The Sultan’s power radiated outwards, from the empire as it was to the empire as it was to be, worldconquering; from court to court, from the palace to the city, away from the city down the roads and passes that led to the borderlands. At the centre of the palace stood the Mansion of Justice, the Sultan’s eye, from where he might look into the hearts of men, and assure himself of the justice of his rule.

  But the Sultan, and not the palace, was the true eye of the empire. Wherever he went, to the old palace in Edirne, to the wars, striking camp after camp on the Maritsa or the Bursa road, or wintering in Topkapi itself, he was surrounded by the same familiar layout, the same faces, the same order of precedence, whether in canvas or in stone. The Sultan was everywhere: not only, by the law of pattern, doubled and redoubled across his empire, but sometimes actually in the midst of things, slipping incognito through the bazaars – Mehmet queerly stabbing anyone who recognised him, on the eve of the Conquest, Sultan Suleyman disguised as a spahi, Sultan Mehmet IV as a Sufi(and so impressed by the smart opinions of a baker that the very next morning he made him Grand Vizier), Sultan Selim the Sot, it is said, honouring the barfly who first showed him the route to paradise, in a bottle, and Murad IV befriending, to his own ruin, one Bekri Mustafa, whom he found in the market quarter, ‘wallowing in the dirt dead drunk’.

  Turnstile of the continents, seal of empires, geomantic paradise, Constantinople was a place of absolutes. It was either very hot, or very cold. Here Europe and Asia met. Here the seas joined. The palace stood like a city within a city, and the Sultan lived in the palace like Narcissus, Blaise de Vigenére said; but Mustafa Ali, his more respectful subject, compared him to an oyster in its shell.

  The conquest of Konstantiniyye, as the city was to be formally known,* was the fulfilment of a prophecy running like a thread through Islamic history, that ‘a just prince’ would conquer the Red Apple of Islamic myth. Under the Turks it became the largest city in the world. The hungriest, too, so that it was fed on army rules. Its presence at the hub of the Ottoman Empire, with mosques and fountains, schools and charities, was the realisation of Mehmet’s will. In kanuns, or laws, issued from the palace in his name, came the terrible ordinance that would ensure that only one man could ever rule the empire at a time: the fratricidal law. Justified, rather tendentiously, by the Koranic verse ‘what is the death of a prince to the loss of a province?’ it allowed sultans to execute their brothers (and
nephews) to prevent power struggles (primogeniture was unknown). When a rough old Turk burst in upon the divan and asked which of the gentlemen present was the fortunate Sultan, the shame, apparently, was so acute that it gave Mehmet an excuse to stop attending the council, as a creature half-divine. He had Halil, the gazi spokesman, executed, and he erased all pretensions other than his own. In his kanun of ceremonies, he abolished the old easy practices of sultans past, who ate with their men, and stood to martial music in remembrance of a fudged old tradition of fealty to the vanished Shepherd Kings. Mehmet said bluntly that those kings were dead. ‘It is my will that the Sultan dines alone,’ he explained, as he made the Ottoman custom of breaking bread with the men into a biennial event.

  Constantinople, from Scheder’s Chronicle, 1493

  ‘We light our lamp with oil taken from the hearts of the infidels,’ Mehmet once wrote, to describe the single institution which made the Ottoman Empire so fantastically strange, and so peculiarly itself. Nothing in the rolling tide of conquest so nearly approached fluidity as the ceaseless production, elevation and disappearance of the highest in the state, the very Ottomans themselves, the Sultan’s kul, his slaves.

  Most sovereign states discovered ways to devolve power, without giving it all away. The Romans and Persians used eunuchs, the kings of Europe unmarried clergy, and the Chinese used their famous exam system to enrol humble but eager scholars into the ranks of the ruling caste.

  Murad II introduced the boy tribute system in 1432. Mehmet carried it to a logical conclusion. Every three years or so, a tribute officer went into the villages of Greece and the Balkans to select the finest Christian youths for the Sultan’s service, consulting parish rolls provided by the local priest or elder. After the march to Istanbul, every youth was sent to work on an Anatolian farm, to build up his muscles, and learn Turkish; and from there, having formally converted to Islam, he went to the schools. His competence, his looks (‘a corrupt and sordid Soul can scarce inhabit in a serene and ingenuous Aspect’), his bearing, his liveliness, intelligence, piety, strength, were tested to assess his suitability for particular branches of the Sultan’s service, and from now until his death, watched and assessed at every step, he was the Sultan’s slave.

  These youths and their predecessors formed, under the Sultan their master, a commonwealth of slaves. Since no born Muslim could be enslaved, their own sons were barred from joining it. So there was no dynastic servitude – Mehmet II tightened the system up when he executed Greek Halil, bringing his family’s long-standing hold on the vizierate to its inglorious end – no dynastic threat, no ‘empire building’ to take place beneath the Grand Turk’s nose. After Halil’s death, thirty-four of the next thirty-six Grand Viziers, though Muslim converts themselves, were not Muslim-born, and in all Europe the Ottoman Empire alone possessed no hereditary nobility. A kapikulu was cut off from his true parents by the gulf of faith and place; he was severed from his children because they were free, and his career could never beat a path for theirs.

  The boys gave up little when they were enrolled as the Sultan’s slaves. Priests were rare in their highland villages, and then as ignorant as their flock, at least as poor, and prone to abuse their position. Churches were scarce. The villagers had a bellyful of sprites, elves, vampires, tree spirits and such, who could be propitiated, moved on or deflected by charms, amulets, magical cures, muttered invocations, scraps of paper with writing on them, ceremonies of renewal with water jugs, feasts marked by sacrifice and meat, to everyone’s relish; and the tribute boys’ arrival in Anatolia probably marked their first contact with religion of a formal sort. The Bektashi order, to which the janissaries were officially attached from 1543, dispensed altogether with some of Islam’s striking peculiarities like the veiling of women, or the prohibition on wine. Insincere conversions didn’t bother the Turks, because they supposed that a man who followed the outward forms would come to believe soon enough, and they felt that they were bringing children back to the faith into which they were born – for every child, according to the founder of the janissaries Kara Halil Chendereli, comes into the world with the beginnings of Islam.*

  What could rival the experience of being drawn from a life of drudgery and obscurity into a world of exhilarating novelty, from a narrow parochial society into the cosmopolitan one of empire, from poverty to all the possibilities of wealth, from the flock to the ranks of rulers, soldiers, wielders of power? If a boy had the qualities the selectors sought, he might be enrolled immediately in one of the palace schools, where boys were trained as pages under the sway of the terrible Chief White Eunuch, whose cruelty Rycaut supposed to be either envy of men, or ‘their nearness to the condition of the cruel sex’. There was nothing effete about the boys: they studied, they practised martial arts, and emerged strong as well as handsome, versed in a dozen branches of learning, frequently displaying some special talent, such as singing, or architecture, or folding turbans (no mean art) and steeped by now in the traditions and mores of the palace – reverence and silence being the first things that new recruits were made to learn. They bent their energy to the practice of obedience; and when their beards grew and they were sent out to fill positions of responsibility in the provinces, ‘none know so well how to govern’, said the Turks, ‘as those who have learned to obey’. Others graduated at the same time into the Noble Guard or, in far greater numbers, joined the royal order of chivalry, the Spahi of the Porte, who formed the Sultan’s regular cavalry.

  Ambassador’s janissary

  The janissaries, who sprang from the same stock, were less cultivated. Out of this brawny second stream came the gardeners, the gate keepers, the scullions and woodcutters, the navvies and shipwrights and marines and infantry. At any point a youth could be selected for the palace schools, if some aptitude had been overlooked. They too received a corporate training, ate and slept together, and had the traditions of the regiment dunned into them from the start, swearing loyalty to their fellows on a tray containing salt, the Koran, and a sword. The bedding reserved for new boys was famously lousy. They had to look lively, and wash and cook for their elders. Even fully fledged janissaries were not allowed to marry: the regiment was their family. They wore its uniform, and had marching bands with martial music, long before the West copied them; music grave and sonorous for the march, and cymbals clashing and eerie for the attack, so that enemies quailed, and their horses shied with fright, while the janissaries were vastly encouraged, and fled if it stopped.

  When western observers understood the principle, it made their hair stand on end. The boy tribute fulfilled the logic of an empire geared for war: just as war booty financed the next assault, so the borderlands could be made to furnish the men who, being raised to perfection in the capital, were turned out again to rule the empire and to expand the frontiers of the state. Worse still, it cut clean across the hereditary principle which western visitors held so dear. Again and again, the Ottomans proved that birth had nothing to do with it. ‘The Turks care not whether these boys are the children of noblemen or of fishermen or shepherds.’ The Venetians saw that boy tribute worked, which was enough for them to admire it – Morosini confessing that ‘their major officials are all good-looking and impressive’, though ‘their manners are uncouth’.

  Just as terrifying was the nonsense the system made of supposed Christian superiority: the apostasy was seldom forced. Western visitors liked to suppose that the crosses they saw tattooed on the hands, or foreheads, of Balkan boys were there to render them unfit for selection; but many other motifs, including crescents, came down with the habit itself from the days of the Old Religion. The janissaries liked to be tattooed with the symbol of their regiment on the leg and on the shoulder. Evidence that the tribute was resisted is patchy; though the tribute gatherer gave plenty of warning of his coming, and the Balkans offered countless avenues for escape. The tribute was collected implacably, but not blindly or with malice. The Turks left widows with their boys, and did not trouble families with a sing
le son. As the convoy wound its way across Muslim Bosnia it had to be heavily guarded to prevent parents from substituting their own offspring. For their own part, they avoided boys who already spoke Turkish, or had learned a trade, or had lived in the city; they refused orphans, too, who were too wily, and had learned too young to fend for themselves.

  The Venetians perceived that the Palladian harmony absent in Ottoman buildings was most handsomely revealed, instead, in the architecture of power itself; and their relazzioni, the reports given by returning ambassadors to the senate, were not only literary productions of a high order, obeying countless Venetian rules of taste and order, but were so eagerly sought after by the world at large that, although secret, they were available in Rome at fifteen paoli per hundred pages, and found their way into the courts and libraries of Europe. A sixteenth-century observer described the entire kul system as a ruthless meritocracy. ‘Each has his good and real fortune in his hand. Being all slaves of a single lord, from whom alone they hope for greatness, honour and riches, and from whom alone on the other hand they fear punishment and death, what wonder is it that in his presence, and in rivalry with one another, they will do stupendous things?’ ‘They care for men,’ Busbecq* reported, ‘as we care for our horses. This is why they lord it over others, and are daily extending the bounds of their empire. These are not our ideas; with us there is no opening left for merit; birth is the standard for everything; the prestige of birth is the sole key to advancement in the public service.’ ‘One of the most Politick Constitutions in the world, and none of the meanest supports of the Ottoman Emire,’ Rycaut wrote soberly.

  The kul were certainly the Sultan’s slaves, but the translation is inexact. The Sultan’s absolute authority over his kul, his power of life and death, and possession of all their wealth, never resembled plantation slavery in America. No opprobrium attached to their position. They could not be bought or sold. Nor – for all their power – did they resemble an aristocracy. Not only were their functions non-hereditary, but their wealth was only a reflection of their status within the hierarchy, and if they stepped out of it – by banishment or death – their wealth stayed with the system, not the man. ‘On their death,’ says Baron Wratislaw, ‘the Emperor will say: “Thou hast been my man, thou hast gained wealth from me; it is a proper thing that after thy death it should be returned back again to me”.’ Absolutely obedient to the Sultan’s will, without right of appeal, dependent on him for favour and maintenance, they were no more than the Sultan’s extended and adopted family, obedient to a patriarch – the son of a slave himself – who enjoyed few practical rights which a father of the time would not possess over his own children. Far from carrying a stigma, the proudest boast of an Ottoman was that he was the slave of the Sultan.