Sokullu himself weathered the death of his master Selim the Sot in 1574, and continued as Grand Vizier under the superstitious Murad III. But on 12 October 1579 he was struck down by an assassin’s dagger as he walked through the palace to the divan. The killer’s motives remain obscure: perhaps he was an agent of the Sultan, perhaps a religious maniac. The tide of everlasting victory, the unbarred tide of time, was beginning to turn back, setting up curious whorls and dangerous eddies; and violence and bitterness at the heart of state were grim portents of things to come.
15
The Cage
1591–2 was the thousandth year of the Hegira, the Islamic millennium. In the far west prudent families moved over the border, telling the Venetians that rumours of impending doom were common currency in the empire. And when the world did not end, nor the Mahdi come, the Ottomans seemed suddenly very weary, as if age-old expectations had been put aside, and replaced by a sense of time more nervously realistic, such as strikes a person approaching forty.
In the 1590s war broke out on two fronts at once, a situation rulers had always been very careful to avoid. The so-called Long War with Austria ran until 1606, when, as a French wag noted, the crescent strained to become a full moon. Simultaneously a twenty years’ war with Iran surged back and forth into Azerbaijan and the Caucasus in a riot of propaganda, and with a severity which seemed to crystallise in the so-called Battle of the Torches, where the armies fought each other in a kind of dream, battling on through the night, and the following day, and into the night again. A rebellion in which Michael the Brave sought to unite Moldavia and Wallachia was not ended by Ottoman intervention, but by hit-men sent by the Habsburgs, who resented his growing power. In the increasing obsolescence of the cavalry, in the flight from the land, in the collapse of the register, the need for cash, the sudden and inexplicable effect of cheap American silver, and in the low calibre of Suleyman’s successors, there was a sense of the empire slowing down.
Hajji Khalifa (1608–57) felt it; he thought wars were fatal to empires which had reached old age. The Venetians noticed it, as they always did. The bailio Lorenzo Bernardo made a return visit to Constantinople in 1593, and what he saw prompted him to say that everything had a youth, a maturity and a decline. Busbecq, in 1543, had been refused permission to move from Constantinople during an epidemic; but Bernardo now saw that Stambouliots chose to avoid the plague, and that even the Grand Mufti had lately fled from an outbreak in the city, setting at naught the old belief that every man’s fate was written on his forehead.
Fatalism had been the ballast of Ottoman valour; but having learned the lesson of the plague, they applied it also to wars, and sought to avoid war wherever possible. Bernardo sensed widespread cynicism: ‘I have known many of these renegades who had no religious beliefs, and said religions were invented by men for political reasons.’ Now that everyone from the Sultan down preferred to stay at home, they busied themselves – Bernardo half-incredulously reported – with details of furniture, and food, clothes, even wine. The kul had gone soft in his lifetime, and no longer was a pasha ‘happy with bread and rice, a carpet and a cushion’; nor ‘showed his importance only by having many slaves and horses with which he could better serve his ruler’.
The inevitable result, Bernardo foresaw, was disobedience and then disunion, especially now that the higher-ups ‘have no other goal but to oppose each other bitterly’. They were marrying into the royal family, he noticed, widening the scope for intrigue. Served with such an example, disobedience was rising among soldiers. The janissaries had collapsed Osman Pasha’s tent upon him for higher pay in Persia. The spahis had rebelled in Istanbul; they had called for the heads of two officials, and ‘no gifts of money, no command from the Sultan would shut them up until they had their way. They took the heads and brutally hurled them along the city streets with horrible cries.’
At the back of it all, the bailio thought, lay the indolence of the Sultan. Once every sultan had struggled to surpass the valour of his forebears, and the only territory the Ottomans had ever lost was Cephalonia to Venice in 1500. When the Sultan campaigned, men had struggled to perform great things in his service, but Selim, father of the present Sultan Murad III, had preferred his wine to war, and the empire’s ‘decline may now be underway. It seems quite possible’, Bernardo wrote, ‘that no sultan would ever go in person on campaigns, but that they would leave them to their slaves, which would certainly start their empire on a downward path.’
In 1596, three years after Bernardo’s warning, Mehmet III conceived the idea that he would go to war, perhaps mindful of the decline of Ottoman prowess, and linking it to the fact that no sultan had accompanied his troops since the death of Suleyman thirty years before. The palace resisted, because it was cheaper to keep sultans at home; but ‘it has been found impossible to delay much further the departure of the Sultan for the [Austrian] war,’ the bailio reported. ‘The Sultana Mother … persuaded a girl of singular beauty, with whom he is desperately in love, to beg him as a favour that he would not go. She did so one day when they were together in a garden; but the Sultan’s love suddenly changed to fury, and drawing a dagger, he slew the girl. Since then no one has dared to approach the subject.’
Mehmet did go to Hungary, presiding over a royal disaster on the Tisza where he dazedly watched his troops cut to pieces by Prince Eugene’s Habsburg army as they struggled to re-form across the river. The following year, the bailio noted, ‘The doctors declared that the Sultan cannot leave for the war on account of his bad health, produced by excesses of eating and drinking.’
Ten years later, in May 1606, Sultan Ahmet I went to review his troops assembling in answer to the horsetails’ summons at Scutari. ‘It is now too late for a campaign,’ the seventeen-year-old Sultan informed the divan, as the court historian Naima recalled. ‘Provisions are scarce and dear. Is it not better to put off the expedition till next year?’ The astonished assembly was silent until the Mufti, who vainly wished that Ahmet would follow the example of the great Suleyman, said, ‘Would it, then, be fitting to carry back the horsetails, that have been planted in the sight of so many foreign ambassadors? Let the troops at least be marched to Aleppo to winter there, and collect stores of provisions.’
The Sultan interposed, ‘What is the use of a march to Aleppo?’ ‘It is of use,’ answered the Mufti, firmly, ‘to save the honour of our tents which have been pitched.’
The Sultan was prevailed upon to allow Ferhad Pasha to take the army on. ‘ “Will he receive the money necessary for the purchase of provisions?” asked the Mufti. The Sultan replied, “The public treasury is empty. Whence am I to draw the money?” “From the Treasury of Egypt.” “That,” said the Sultan, “belongs to my private purse.” “Sire,” was the rejoinder, “your great ancestor, Sultan Suleyman, before the campaign at Szigeth, sent all his own treasures of gold and silver to the public mint.”
‘Sultan Ahmet knit his brows, and said, “Effendi, thou understandest not. Times are changed. What was fitting then is not convenient now.” The result was, that Ferhad Pasha did set off with a part of the army without pay or supplies. The troops mutinied on their march, and were routed by the first band of rebels whom they encountered in Asia Minor.’* Ahmet himself soon sank into the oblivion of his harem, where the Jewish procuress Mme La Quira, also known as the Sultana Sporca, consoled him with hugely fat black girls.†
Any yardstick will signal the better fortune of the first ten rulers of the dynasty, from Osman Bey to Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, who died in 1566. The old sultans had prepared their sons for rulership by making them governors of provinces, and surrounding them with advisers. These ten reigned an average of twenty-seven years apiece; campaigned with the troops, won battles, and earned sobriquets like Grim, Magnificent, and Conqueror. In the century which followed, sultans averaged twelve years on the throne: out of the next ten sultans, five were deposed, and two assassinated. Of the twenty-six sultans who followed Suleyman the Magnificent, Selim w
as to be known as the Sot, Ibrahim as the Mad, Abdulhamid (at least in the European yellow press) as the Damned. Many of them seemed to be mentally unstable – a fact which could hardly be put down to the dangers of in-breeding which affected aristocracies in the West, but is easily explained by the atrocious conditions in which they were raised.
When Mehmet III took the throne in 1595 nineteen princely corpses had been carried from the Gate in obedience to the law of sultanic fratricide. The youths had been ‘brought to him, one by one. They say that the eldest, a beautiful lad and of excellent parts, exclaimed: “My lord and brother, now to me as a father, let not my days be ended thus, in this my tender age”; the Sultan tore his beard with every sign of grief, but answered never a word.’ The sight of the terrible cortège passing through the streets moved even Istanbul – all Mehmet’s sisters died, too, for good measure; but the city wept less for them.
None of the early sultans had any living male relatives, other than their own sons: the fratricidal law ensured that they had no uncles, no cousins, no nephews to challenge their authority, or weaken their position as the sole representative of the House of Osman. Mehmet’s successor, Ahmet I, broke with fratricidal law. After his accession in 1603, Ottoman princes were no longer killed as a matter of routine. But they never left the harem either. Uncles and brothers began to pool in the harem quarters, and the iron law of descent to the ablest son gave way to the right of the eldest living male to inherit the sultanate.
The princes-in-waiting were confined to the inner sanctum of the harem, the so-called Cage, or kafes, to await a sudden or natural death, or coronation, dragging out their existence in a state of suspended animation, amused by concubines whose sterility was guaranteed, withdrawn from the flow of life. Not even high potentates could predict how many princes might be found when turbulent soldiery broke down the palace doors and looked about for a suitable candidate for the throne. Men in advancing states of delirium and fear had to be raised from dungeons at the end of a rope, or let out of a dark attic through a trapdoor, before power was thrust upon them. It is said that Murad IV ordered the death of his brother Ibrahim while he himself lay dying in 1640; that he struggled to rise, to view the corpse, and ‘grinned horrible a ghastly smile’ in the belief that he was the last of his line. But Ibrahim had been preserved, in a furious harem struggle between the departing Valide Sultan and his mother, to rule as the very maddest of this increasingly mad and morbid family.
High office was dangerous. ‘May you be vizier to Selim the Grim!’ an old curse ran, and it is said that Selim I’s viziers carried their wills in their bosom at all times. Generally, a Grand Vizier’s chance of survival was only ten to one, so that one Grand Vizier compared himself to an ant, ‘to whom God gives wings for their speedier destruction’. But ‘paradise and sovereignty are never united’, as the saying went, and the sultans themselves ran risks as grave as any of their slaves. Thirty-six sultans were girded with Osman’s sword; seventeen of them were deposed. Westerners were learning to accuse Ottoman sultans of absolute tyranny, at the very moment that sultans were proving remarkably susceptible to defeat. Louis XIV, for one, was never held to account for French disasters on the battlefield, but the supposed tyrants of the Ottoman Empire seemed incapable of surviving military reverses once fresh princes were stockpiled in the kafes.
An admirer had once described the Sultan as an oyster in his shell; but the artful mechanisms by which Mehmet and his successors enforced their majesty soon clicked shut. Ixarette, sign language, was introduced to the Seraglio by two mute brothers, and Suleyman encouraged its use, believing that silence enhanced the Sultan’s dignity. When Suleyman’s rebellious son Bayezit fled to Persia in 1565, Shah Tahmasp’s courtiers found him incapable of maintaining the light and easy flow of learned conversation that was proper to a gentleman in their eyes; probably with some relief they handed this awkward uninvited guest back to his father’s executioner. Suleyman’s weaker successors found ixarette suffocating, and in 1617 poor mad Sultan Mustafa refused to learn it. He was brought to book by a menacing discussion of the issue in divan; it was not proper, the viziers informed him, that the Padishah should speak in the language of copers and thieves, but he should maintain a gravity to make men tremble. Mustafa’s little rebellion finished him off. Du Fresne, for his part, was very struck by the Sultan’s attempt to respond to the ambassador, before the Grand Vizier cut him off – ‘lui dit qu’il ne seyait pas a la majesté d’un si grand roi de trop parler avec les ambassadeurs, prit la parole et déclara brièvement ce qu’il avait à répondre’; and he hit on a resonant image of loneliness when he observed how, in the Sultan’s lovely gardens, ‘the alleys are lined with cypresses so high that their sight excites admiration; but they are narrow, for the Grand Seigneur always walks alone’.
Osman II, girded with the sword at Eyup in 1618, attempted a coup d’état against his own servants, ‘the Drones that eat up his estate’. He meant to escape from Istanbul, raise a new army in Anatolia, and seize the empire afresh as master of a Turkish, Muslim state, but an angry crowd gathered outside the palace gates; the Grand Vizier sent out to calm them was torn to pieces; and Osman himself was finally taken into custody by the janissaries. His fate was sealed when a search was made of the harem for male relatives, turning up a few brothers; and the soldiers drew his starving, raving uncle out of a dungeon by a rope and made him Sultan. The new Grand Vizier walked into the room where Osman was asleep. Osman, we are told, woke up, and defended himself desperately; but the fabled training of the Sultan’s kul won out when Davut Pasha put him to death ‘by the compression of his testicles’, Evliya Celebi records; adding that this was ‘a mode of execution reserved by custom to the Ottoman sultans’.
His successor was his uncle, Mustafa. When Mustafa was returned to the Cage in favour of Osman in 1618, he twice escaped strangulation by a hair’s breadth, and was imprisoned in a tiny room over a sunless courtyard tucked away behind the quarters of the harem favourites. The experience had not been of much help to him. Insane enough before, his restoration was brief, and the janissaries were so perturbed by his madness that they agreed to let Murad IV accede without paying the accession donative.
Murad IV was thirteen when he came to the throne, and he was dominated for many years by his mother, the Valide Sultan Kosem. A military riot in the capital turned on the palace in November 1631; the Grand Vizier, Grand Mufti, and fifteen courtiers and advisers including Murad’s favourite page, Musa Celebi, were ripped apart by the mob, who forced the Sultan to appoint one Topal Recep Pasha as Grand Vizier, and proceeded to loot and murder in the streets of Constantinople. Six months later, exploiting popular outrage against the soldiers’ depredations, Murad had Topal strangled. With a new Grand Vizier, he fell upon the mutineers, killing 20,000; tobacco, coffee, alcohol and boza, the unfermented millet beverage the janissaries loved, were banned; and he led, in person, a grand campaign against Iran, capturing Erevan and Tabriz in the summer of 1635. The kadi of Izmit was beheaded for letting the roads fall into disrepair, and that year, with all the ulema turning against him, Murad had the Grand Mufti executed with his son. He instilled terror in his men and recovered something of the old ways of the state – for he retook Baghdad on Christmas Day 1638, digging the trenches with his own hands; but even he was able to achieve only one reform, and that one dear to the officials’ hearts: the formal abolition of the boy tribute. In every other field he found himself treacled in by the soft resistance of the palace functionaries, and he finally died of drink, which he discovered late, overwhelmed by alcoholic manias, ‘running through the streets barefoot,’ Cantemir recalls, ‘with only a loose gown around him, like a madman, [he] killed whoever came in his way. Frequently from the windows … he shot with arrows such as accidentally passed by …’
Murad IV was the last sultan to rule, rather than merely reign, for a century and a half – and he died, as we saw, believing Ibrahim was dead. Among his successors, Osman III had spent fifty years in the
Cage, with his deaf mutes and barren women; Selim III, the reformer, fifteen; and for many months after they were brought out, both apparently found it very hard to frame their words. Suleyman II had been in the Cage for thirty-nine years, copying and illuminating the Koran; he reigned for just thirty months, and often asked, in that time, to be allowed to return to his prison.
Machiavelli had described the Ottoman state as one which would be hard to conquer, but easy to hold. It turned out, though, that the conquest was internal, as power slid from the sultans to their slaves.
* From Naima, via Creasy.
† Mme La Quira was rewarded with jobs for all her family, and was eventually strangled at the insistence of the mob.
16
The Spiral
Power was a slippery thing in the early 1600s. The pashas were caught up in the crisis of the closing frontier. New jobs grew scarce. The state had encouraged provincial governors to enrol militias to keep order in these tumultuous times; but they were tempted to use them to defy the Porte, defraying their cost by raising local taxes on their own initiative. The Porte winked at this, for without the levies it might have no army. Assailed on the one hand by the demands of the new breed of warrior, the professional musketeer, and the rise of inflation on the other, the state was forced into massive tax-gathering efforts which increased the burden on the peasantry.
Lords of the Horizons Page 18