Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  There were shops in Bulgaria whose rents were taken to feed the poor of Medina. Some shop rents went to the maintenance of nearby bridges, or drinking fountains. So many hans were set up on the Edirne road, providing travellers with food and lodging, that the Sultan actually forbade any more to be established. When Mehmet II issued a kanun abolishing a large number of vakif, and at a stroke brought 20,000 villages into the sultanic fisc, he was regarded like a modern politician who raids the pension fund: within a year he was dead, amid rumours that he had been poisoned. Islamic civic society, in consequence, was marvellously insulated from the vagaries of politics, going its own collective way; its clubs, guilds, secret societies, religious cults, trading networks cast a net of mutual support across the empire. So much was dedicated to God, the Eternal, the coming of paradise on earth: for the Ottomans lived on the brink, as they thought, of a golden age.

  ‘The dog barks, the caravan moves on,’ goes an old saying; and the annals of the empire do now and then exude an air of expectation. In Anatolia the arrival of the Mahdi who was to usher in the end of the world was forever being celebrated by a rabble of peasants who moved toward the capital, overturning everything in their path, suffering delusions of immense joy.* Baron Wratislaw’s gaoler in the Seven Towers once brought him the news that Raab had fallen to the Turks, a fact which the gaoler understood to mean, not the loss of a fortress, but the long-awaited collapse of all Christendom. He even advised his prisoners to convert, since now they had nowhere else to go.

  The Ottomans were born to move, and this fact had made them warriors: for upon the frontiers of the empire, movement inevitably meant war. They accepted death and disappointment fatalistically, as they accepted without question the burdens of their caste. ‘There is nothing wonderful in emperors being defeated and made prisoners,’ wrote Suleyman consolingly to the King of France, who languished in an Italian prison cell. The customary response of an Ottoman pasha to his own death warrant was never indignation, but surprise – grimly comical, at times – followed by resignation. It has been said that the incessant westward movement of the frontier represented not so much an urge to subjugate as an urge for consummation: a desire to belong. The sultans were always to be found visiting the borders of their empire, the whole panoply of state going west to the Danube, or east to the Euphrates. Christendom seemed to shrink from contact. It was the West which at last attempted a lock-out, erecting its Militärgrenze, with forts, and establishing quarantine stations, through which every traveller from the empire had to pass; twenty days or more in one of those lazarettos which Murray’s Handbook called ‘prison, with a chance of catching the plague’.

  The Ottoman urge to motion craved satisfaction. The kul could leave nothing to their sons, and their status required continual display. Power, like the grandeur of the palace, could not be still; it could not be stored, as it was in the palaces of the West, or in the bloodlines of European aristocracy. The Venetians understood this: for years, as their real power waned, they fought tooth and nail to maintain the precise detail of their bailio’s reception at the palace, and again and again, in their relazioni, scrupulously described the entire rigmarole; while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu confessed she could not be bothered to write about it at all. Everything about a pasha was indicated by his clothes, and where he went, and the size of the retinue he maintained: Ottoman society concentrated fiercely on the act. Presents were handed out at every meeting; prayers had to be said regularly by everyone, to affirm belief.

  * Dmitri Cantemir (1673–1723) belonged to the Greek-speaking aristocracy of the Principalities. He arrived in Istanbul from Moldavia at the age of fifteen, and for twenty-two years held court in his palace at Fethiye, or in his mansion at Ortakoy, by the Bosphorus, where he first notated Turkish music. In 1710 he was appointed Voivode of Moldavia; his dreams of independence were foiled by the Ottoman defeat of Peter the Great on the Pruth in 1711. Cantemir escaped Ottoman vengeance by hiding in the Tsar’s coach; his successor was a Phanariot Greek from Constantinople. Brought into a comfortable Russian exile – fifty villages, 50,000 serfs – as a royal counsellor, he excised his nostalgia for Istanbul by writing his History of the Turks in 1714–16, the standard work on the subject before von Hammer in the nineteenth century. Conceiving the history as an arc of rise and decline, the book was partly written to justify his treachery. As his story unfolds, his footnotes, crammed with personal observations, ideas and interpretations, start to take over the text in a very entertaining way. The book was first published in England, where his son was Russian ambassador. It was rapidly translated: Voltaire praised it; the German edition was dedicated to Maria Theresa. Gibbon quoted it. Byron and Shelley used it.

  * The Germans call the Turks Sackenleute, ‘bag-people’.

  † This language of flowers was briefly fashionable in the West as a result of her research.

  * Twenty years later, an ambassador complained that his stuff was mere copper and brass, which, he said, depreciated his mission and reflected poorly on the grandeur of the Ottoman state. Selim III told him that the honour and glory of the state did not depend on whether Mustafa Rasih Pasha had utensils made of silver.

  * An exception was the palace which Suleyman’s Grand Vizier Ibrahim erected for himself. Outside its gates he set two statues looted after the fall of Buda, one of Apollo, the other of Diana. The people understood them to be the King and Queen of Hungary.

  * ‘Because its beauty is so rare a sight / The sea has clasped it in an embrace’, wrote Nabi, but he continued: ‘Were it not for all kinds of diseases / Were it not for the accursed plague / Who would ever leave this place like paradise / This grief-dispelling city? / If only its weather were more equable / Who would ever look at any other place?’

  † Probably the Byzantines gave the Ottomans little directly. A troop of warriors attending the Emperor, whose spleens had been removed for reasons even the Byzantines had forgotten, the Turks superstitiously maintained. For women, a Byzantine gauze veil replaced sackcloth; but that was town sophistication, and the fact that Byzantine women were veiled at all suggests how far the cultures were already intertwined.

  * In 1513, heralding an explosion of Ottoman geographies and travel books, Piri Reis, corsair and later Admiral of the Red Sea Fleet, produced a two-fold map of the world: the western portion has survived. People still speculate on how he was able to include the New World, which Columbus had discovered only twenty years before; some put it down to information from a Spanish seaman captured at Valencia in a raid by Piri Reis’s uncle; others argue for arcane knowledge. Piri Reis engaged the Portuguese with considerable success around the Persian Gulf, and was instrumental in bringing southern Arabia under direct Ottoman control in the 1540s. His successor, Seydi Ali Reis, was driven off by the Portuguese in 1554; he escaped to India, reaching Constantinople in May 1557 after an epic land voyage through India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran, recorded in his Mirror of the Lands.

  * As late as 1785 one of the oddest marching Mahdis approached Smyrna and Sivas with his followers. An Italian born in Montferrat, he became a notorious seducer and then a fiercely proselytising Dominican friar. Sent to take up a sensitive post in Mosul, his zeal for converts actually earned him excommunication from the church. Subsequently he became a Muslim, then a self-proclaimed Mahdi, and with Persian backing launched his mission on the empire. At the height of his success he inexplicably agreed to fight for Catherine the Great. Four years later the Turks captured him. They kindly gave him a pension and in 1798 he retreated into an Armenian monastery.

  13

  The Turkish Time

  ‘The Turks,’ wrote Busbecq, ‘have no hours to mark the time, just as they have no milestones to mark distances.’ Nobody thought to count the hours, or to reckon the days, or to quail before any of the distances to be covered – neither the soldier setting out from Istanbul, nor the ploughman squaring up to his stony slopes, nor the pasha, rising to the business of the day. People lived, did and died: eve
ryone knew that.

  The unfolding pattern of Ottoman conquest resembled a truth revealed, not created; and the early Ottomans dealt with time in a lordly way, as nomads do. A day was appointed for their deaths, as it was for victory. They never looked back, or calculated risk. A janissary giant called Hasan was the first onto the walls of Constantinople; and although Hasan was cut down by the defenders, every Turkish assault threw up its Hasan, charging bull-necked into the breach, ready to claim in an instant his martyrdom, and all the houris due to him in paradise. When the Turks dodged the chronicler and his dates; and Bayezit earned the nickname ‘Thunderbolt’ for the rapidity of his marches; and they sliced new roads through barren mountains to fall, with horrid suddenness, on some enemy – ‘Woe! thunderation! What an army!’ cried poor Uzan Hasan in 1461, as he watched Mehmet’s forces spread from the hills like lava, before seizing, in a twinkle, the age-old empire of Trebizond; then time seemed flat and immeasurable like the steppe, encouraging great speed. Foreigners envied the speed of law; and Ottoman horsemen rode like the very wind, astonishing one nineteenth-century traveller who reckoned 30 miles in a day good going for a man on horseback. Here, he said, ‘100 is fast travelling; 150 the fastest; 600 miles in four days and a half, and 1,200 in ten, are indeed, feats, but not very uncommon ones.’

  The idea that the whole world would be subsumed within a single commonwealth belonged to the framework of European thought until at least the seventeenth century, but few could back the pretension with quite the same wide-eyed confidence or resources as the Ottoman state. The fifteenth-century inscription on the Bursa mosque – ‘Lord of the Horizons, Burgrave of the Whole World’ – may have been, in narrow terms, a fraud; but it was the fraud of an optimistic age. Every new sultan, girded with the sword of Orhan – the particularly Ottoman version of coronation – bent his lips to the ear of the janissary aga and whispered, ‘Let us meet at the Red Apple,’ by which he meant whatever will’-o’-the-wisp lay beyond Islam’s grasp: Constantinople, Rome, Vienna. Bayezit fully intended to conquer Austria, and be in France next; he meant to stable his horse in St Peter’s. Mehmet the Conquerer, says Kritovolos, ‘immediately overran the whole world in his calculations’, taking Constantinople for its centre; and in gloomy moments the Venetians – who knew the Ottoman world better than any other Christian power, and could calculate that the Sultan’s receipts exceeded his expenses – would judge the Ottomans to be sure victors in the eschatalogical project of achieving world empire. For when they effused over Constantinople’s position, it was not the disinterested praise of the traveller, nor even entirely the businessman’s assessment: it was mostly the suspicion that the propaganda that had issued from the place ever since Constantine founded it in AD 376 was true, and Constantinople was created by nature, ordained by history, to be the centre of the world. There was a belief that an emperor would usher in the Second Coming, and a familiar prophecy that four empires were to rule before the Kingdom of God was established on earth. There was a strong indication, however you looked at it, that the Ottomans, and Islam, had everything on their side, and that ‘to fight,’ as one Barbero wrote in 1573, was ‘useless’.

  Ottomans judged themselves against no yardstick of progress. The notion was blasphemous; in the Sayings of the Prophet one might read that ‘Every novelty is an innovation, every innovation is an error, every error leads to Hellfire.’ Time was circular, not linear. When Evliya Celebi went raiding in Podolia in 1684, he found himself looting in the very house he had looted in 1683: and when he opened a closet in the bedroom he was able to retrieve, as the most natural thing in the world, the little hatchet he had left behind.*

  The hillmen of Albania or the Caucasus were as much given to vendetta as Sardinians. An offence remained as fresh as on the day it was given; vengeance was bequeathed; honour could be satisfied by a well-aimed shot in the back forty, or sixty, or even a hundred years after the offence. Earlier this century Edith Durham travelled rough through Albania, and everywhere she was greeted with effortless courtesy by these fierce and independent people, for the grisliest Arnaut was a gentleman (some of the women, as it happened, were gentlemen too: they dressed like men, and farmed and fought their corner as members of a beardless bachelor sorority). They lived, she found, like birds, who sleep at dusk and rise at dawn, summer and winter. No Albanian would admit that their summer nights were shorter than those of any other season of the year. They had twenty-four hours in a day like anyone else; but twelve to night, and twelve to light. Durham yawned, and nodded in her chair; at dusk she was allowed to crawl to bed; but at dawn her hosts awoke refreshed, congratulating themselves on having had a really good night’s sleep.

  Du Fresne, a young Huguenot who joined an ambassadorial suite to Istanbul in 1623, claimed there was then just one public clock in the whole of the Ottoman empire; it was at Skopje, it tolled the hours à la française, and its survival, or erection, was considered something of a marvel, for bells and public clocks were generally outlawed in the empire. The Grand Vizier Ibrahim had proudly taken the title Breaker of the Bells of the Pagans when he had anchored his pontoon bridge across the Danube with the assembled peal of Buda. A sixteenth-century visitor had been irked by his janissary escort’s habit of waking him hours before they were due to start, which he discovered was because they were unable to tell the time correctly; he showed them his watch and bade them rest easy, which at first they found hard to do; but after a few days’ sleeping with one eye open they began to trust him, and all agreed that the watch was a wonderful thing for getting a good night’s rest.* When Busbecq praised the Turks for their unique readiness to adopt the useful inventions of others, he made an exception of clocks and printing, both which might, he thought, challenge the dominion of the mullahs.

  The moon governed the caravans from which Islam sprang, for desert journeys were made by night (the Turks call the morning star Kervan Kiran, or ‘the caravan breaking’). The moon was the symbol of the faith; and the dread hour of the Muslim world was not midnight, but high noon. At that flat moment the devil took the world on his horns and prepared to make off with it, before he was blasted in his triumph by the cry ‘God is most great’, deliberately called from the minarets a few seconds after midday.

  The attachment to a lunar calendar gave the empire a peculiar feeling of transcendence – allowed it to function at a remove from the rough material world, inhabited by the reaya, the peasants, and their interminable harvests. The Islamic year spun faster than the sun: so Ramadan falling in summer is the fiercest hardship for the faithful, who may not swallow so much as their own spittle between sunrise and sundown, a time of fraying tempers. But the ecstasy of Ramadan surpasses all conventions, and for a month the days are like nights, and the nights like day. The sun is always a disc, but the moon curves, swells, declines – and returns. She indicates the essentially illusory nature of time itself, for her phases are only apparent, and her substance never changes.

  The matter of time was one of those things like horse-breeding, or pastry, for which everyone relied on experts. The holy men knew how time should be used. There were water-clocks and sundials in certain mosques to indicate the hours of prayer, tended by a class of men called talismans. The ulema issued almanacs to the lunar year of 354 days, noting in columns the prayer times, the solar and lunar months and days, phases of the moon, sunsets and sunrise, and the timing of Greek festivals, too. These gave guidance to propitious and ill-starred days – days good for petitioning, bad for buying horses. The 9th of Safer 1593, for example, was a good day to invite people for dinner; the 16th very bad for travelling.

  Alongside the Holy Koran, the law of the land was given in the Sultan’s kanun, decrees which operated over areas of life for which the Prophet had made no explicit provision; and they had the force of the old Turkic adet, the utterances of the pre-Islamic chiefs. The Ottomans sought moments in the cosmic pattern – Suleyman made his entrance into Buda after consulting astrologers as a matter of course, but once when he
considered it more important to maintain his army’s strength than to observe the letter of the Law, he publicly ate a lunch during the fast of Ramadan as an example to his troops.

  God Himself, the arbiter of fate, made time and space irrelevant; the ulema attended to the mysteries of time’s calibration; but the very longevity of the royal line – the empire’s only hereditary power – seemed like a material expression of eternities, and lent every sultan a transcendent dignity and importance. The Sultan bound time to himself, as he bound all the powers and currents of the empire into his own hands, just as he dyed his beard and hair, never allowing a telltale streak of grey to disturb the illusion that about him time stood still. So carefully did Suleyman the Magnificent tend the link between his person and the cycle of renewal, that he never wore the same clothes twice, but appeared each day anew, like the sun.