It was hard for anyone to put their finger exactly on the source of the trouble; they could only lament the passing of the old days, and the old ways, before the reaya took to arms, and obedience was lost. ‘All acted as they pleased,’ lamented the old historian Selaniki. ‘As tyranny and injustice increased, people … began to flee to Istanbul. The old order and harmony departed.’
Once the tendency had been for all elements of the empire to pull together; the tendency for them to fall apart was now strong. In 1651 the Valide Sultan Kosem, mother of two sultans, and a wily survivor of harem politics and intrigue, finally lost her grip on power. She was hunted down in her private apartments and discovered, after a long search, hiding under a pile of quilts.
Assaulted by furious young men, greedy of Riches; she was in a moment despoiled of her Garments; her Furs were torn off into small pieces; and being stript of her rings, Bracelets, Garters and other things; she was left naked without a Rag to cover her, and dragged by the feet to the Cushana: and being at the place of her execution, the young Officers found themselves unprovided of a Cord to strangle her, so that crying out for a Cord, one ran to the Chappel Royal, and thence took the Cord that upheld the great Antiport of the Mosch, which being twined about the Queen’s Neck, the aforesaid Dogangi getting upon her back, pitched her neck with his hands, whilst the others drew the Cord. The Queen, though she were by this time besides her Senses, and worn out with age, being above 80 Years old, and without Teeth; yet she with her Gums only did bite the Thumb of his left Hand, which by chance came into her Mouth, so hard, that he could not deliver himself until with the haft of his Poniard he struck her on the Forehead near her right Eye. There were four that strangled her, but being young Executioners, laboured long to dispatch her, till at length the Queen leaving to struggle, lay stretched out, and was supposed to be dead, and so crying she is dead, she is dead, ran to carry the news thereof to his Majesty; but being scarce out of sight, the Queen raised herself up, and turned her Head about; upon which the Executioners being again called back, the Cord was a second time applied, and wrung so hard with the haft of a hatchet, that at length she was dispatched …
So Paul Rycaut describes the scene, and he goes on to say that upon that frightful murder the smooth functionaries of the court forgot years of careful training in their panic and terror. ‘The ears of witnesses were assailed by a tumult of different voices and tongues. Some shouted in Georgian, some in Albanian, some in Bosnian, some in Mingrelian, others in Turkish or Italian’, and in their robes of office, sporting the turbans of their rank, stuck with the aigrettes and feathers and seals indicative of their position in this seamless enterprise, all yammered helplessly at one another, unable to understand what anyone else was saying.
* Ibrahim Metin Kunt notes that between 1568 and 1574 half all appointees could expect terms of three or more years; by 1632-41 the proportion was one in ten.
* Twenty can still be seen.
† The trouble seems to have been exacerbated by Ottoman conquests in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus in the early seventeenth century; Anatolian peasant immigrants considered themselves timariots. Balkan opportunities had dried up.
* At least according to one interpretation. Another suggests that Rustem’s enemies attempted to forestall his marriage to the Princess Mihrimah by accusing him of leprosy; the doctors who examined him, though, found only lice – supposedly incapable of infesting lepers. The wedding went ahead, proof of the old Turkish proverb, ‘When a man has his luck in place, even a louse can bring him good fortune.’
17
The Empire
‘It is no unpleasant sight, to behold a new scene of the World, and unknown face of things, in habits, Dyet, Manners, Customs and Language,’ wrote the traveller Edward Brown in the summer of 1669. ‘A man seems to take leave of our world, when he hath passed a day’s journey from Raab: and, before he cometh to Buda, seems to enter upon a new stage of the world, quite different from that of the Western countrys: for he then bids adieu to hair on the head, bands, Cuffes, Hats, Gloves, Beds, Beer.’ Brown was writing for generations of western visitors who invariably felt, as they crossed the threshold of the Dar ul-Islam, that they had entered another world.
The empire never really had a shape, except as a sort of figure of eight, intersecting at Istanbul; but when you came across the Danube at Raab, or over the high passes of the Dalmatian coast, or by sea – thirty-six days from Venice to Constantinople in the 1650s – from Italy or Marseilles, even the oxygen of the place was foreign. ‘Do you not breathe the Gran Signor’s air?’ a seventeenth-century vizier demanded, as he squeezed the foreign merchants. ‘And will you pay him nothing for it?’
The border, by then, was not a lively place itself. The Christians had ringed the border with their forts and quarantine stations, the Turks had dotted it with garrisons, and it had the hackneyed air of a place forgotten, stirred up now and then by the passage of armies, and raiding bands. Ottoman merchants seldom bothered to come this far; the quarantine, if not the insecurity of the Christian lands beyond, discouraged them. From the west this great divide, this cultural fault line running through Europe, brought a nip of the energy stored up there by the men who had pushed the frontiers out – to the Adriatic coast, and the Hungarian plains, to the banks of the Danube and the Dnieper, the shores of the Caspian and the deserts of the Maghreb – in the days when the Ottoman frontier was alive. ‘After that,’ William Makepiece Thackeray reported, ‘there is nothing. The wonder is gone, and the thrill of that delightful shock.’
Everyone had their premonitory moment. For the young English traveller Alexander Kinglake in 1846 it came when his bags were snatched up, fought over, and finally carried up from the river bank at Esen by an improbably large number of colourfully dressed men. For the young Czech nobleman Baron Wratislaw in the summer of 1599 it was finding people offering the tiniest of services for payment – the Turks, he advised, are very ‘calmed’ by money. Frenchmen noticed that boots, gaiters, doublet and hose, or whatever European fashion was then in vogue, had been left behind for a battery of different hats, and the simplest sort of flowing robes. It was the moment, a sixteenth-century philosopher who had never been there explained, that the traveller from Venice would feel he had left a city and entered a sheepfold. You had arrived in the empire when the soldiers presented you with flowers and a kiss. You were there when a splendid retinue of mounted spahis, their lances pennanted, their chests draped with the skins of wild beasts, their turbans gleaming white, their faces dark and weatherbeaten, bows strung, arrows aquiver, galloped up in a cloud of dust to supply you with an escort. In 1599 the English merchant George Sandys knew he was about to get there when the crew of his Greek-run ship began to behave oddly and, claiming it was death to bring in wine, ‘they loth to poure such good liquor into the sea, drank it: the captain seems half the time dead, and the other, lively and violent; a blind man striked the air with his cane and toppled into the sea; the captain, as if of a sodaine restored to life, lays about him with a cutlass, so everyone dives off the boat.’
Hard, humped and crowded up were the mountains of the Balkans, with steep defiles and snow-bound passes, miserable villages which looked like the rubbish thrown out by a town, whole nations tucked up so safely in their high lairs that they might only be approached on hands and knees, and only then if you avoided looking down. Dark and enveloping was the canopy of oaks which spread over your head as you entered Serbian-speaking country, and which marched with you for days on end to the superstitious dread of your janissary attendant. Green and wet were the paddy fields of the Maritsa, in Bulgaria. Very dry and hot were the corrugated folds of Thrace, fit only for goats. The empire’s springs were sulphurous, travellers said, and none of its towns had clocks or walls, and anyone making the three-day crossing by sea, from Bari to Durresi across the Adriatic, invariably met with a storm, and fetched up anywhere he could, after a fortnight at sea, thin and bewildered.
The people of one valley in Bosnia
all had goitres, and wore sandals. The farmers of Bulgaria were invariably respectful. The herdsmen of the Pindus were always wild. In the Dalmatian mountains lived a race of giants, whose guns were longer than the giants were tall. If the Jews of Thessalonica could still show you the keys to old houses and godowns in Granada, to which they meant shortly to return, then the Albanians could point out the eagles from whom they were descended. The girls of a village outside Plovdiv were all princesses of Byzantine blood, as Busbecq fancied he could tell by their fine carriage, and smouldering good looks.
For food ‘on a rimmed tray, a dish of boiled barley or rice, soupy, and large piece of mutton. Around the dish nice-looking bread. Also a dish of honey or piece of comb,’ one traveller recalled; another described fetta as ‘a beastly kind of unpressed Cheese that lyeth in a lump’. Europeans grumbled about folding their legs and sitting on the floor; by the nineteenth century grown men were filling whole pages of their travel books with semicomic descriptions of the pain. Instead of a jolly Christian inn, the traveller might shack up in some dismal, bug-infested han – ‘a range of rotten shanties surrounding a manure-heap’, in a humid windowless chamber where you lay down to sleep on a pile of straw. When a han was no good, it was really awful: the straw second-hand, the rooms freezing, bugs abundant, alarming fellow guests, and a solitary attendant behind a ‘small door bolted, barred and barricaded; the little grated window secured the cage of the prisoner within, who dealt out garlic, salt, cheese, olives’, and sometimes a bottle of nasty Greek wine, like an off-licence in a jittery neighbourhood. Busbecq preferred to tidy up a local shed, screen off the fire with his tent canvas, set up his table and chair, and ‘live as happy as the King of Persia’. Lord Harry Cavendish in 1589, as a Genoese agent, slept in a succession of haystacks, a peasant’s cart, a church porch and a hen-coop. ‘O khans of Albania! Alas! the night is not yet worn through!’ wailed Edward Lear, three centuries later; ‘Numberless fleas … Bulky spiders, allured by the warmth, fall thick and frequent from the raftered ceiling. O khans of Tyrana! Big frizzly moths, bustling into my eyes and face!’ But with luck, the visitor was carried to some magnificent caravanserai, part bazaar, part refuge, where a merchant’s goods could be stored in vaults with massive barred gates, and the horses tethered in proper stables, and the upstairs rooms around the courtyard were at the disposal of travellers, each with a fireplace, some private and some dormitory, but provided with bathrooms and lavatories; where the traveller was entitled to three days’ food and lodging, free of charge.
Crossing overland from the west you bade ‘to Christian tongues a long adieu’, Byron said – Hungarian, Mingrelian, Serbo-Croat, Greek, Bulgarian – and Castilian Spanish, if you landed at Salonica. If you sailed up to Constantinople through the Dardanelles you were met in Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian (‘there is ten of these languages spoke in my own family,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, forgetting Georgian). Some low-life character might finger your sleeve and address you in his native French, and a helpful seaman would put you on your way in the familiar dialect of the Veneto, and you might even hear the scowling Admiral of the Ottoman fleets, a kapudan pasha famously intolerant of Christians, and plainly weighing every one he met for the frisky plank, half-suppress a native Italian oath.
It was a country of queer distortions and half-echoes. In Salonica, in 1814, a smart Greek girl sang a popular patriotic song which suddenly carried Henry Holland back ‘to the shores of the Faxe-Fiord in Iceland; where two years before I had unexpectedly caught the sounds of this very air, played on the chords of the Icelandic langspiel’. What an outlandish brand of familiarity! In the Albanians Byron recognised some forgotten link to his own Highlanders, for ‘their very mountains seemed Caledonian; … the kilt, though white, the spare active form; their dialect, Celtic in its sound, and their hardy habits, all carried me back to Morven,’ he wrote in 1809. Other visitors felt more bewildered. ‘In every one of their customs they do exactly the contrary of what Christians do,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian diplomat. ‘One would think that this is what their legislator intended when he decreed their ceremonies. Few Turks are adept at operating machinery; they do not cultivate the land … play neither handball or football … do not fire cannonballs …’ Ottoman Jews were so free of ghetto pallor as to be practically unrecognisable to western Europeans, who were baffled by the Ottoman’s religious tolerance. For Christians in a supposedly Muslim empire some Hungarian stockholders looked fat and well dressed; and it was hard to credit that the men lining up for free soup in the shadow of the mosque were all Muslim, and dirt-poor. The peasantry seemed to wear their hats upside down, narrow at the bottom and wide and teetering on top; while several travellers remarked on the way they dressed hot on top and thin around the legs, both summer and winter. It was much the same with houses, all of which, Eliot believed, were ‘constructed entirely with a view to the summer, and the advent of winter … seems a constant source of surprise. The inhabitants huddle into one room heated by an iron stove or open brazier, and leave empty the rest of the house which cannot be warmed.’ The fishing boats of Ohrid were rowed by three men all on one side, near the front. ‘The result of their labour is actually to make the boat turn round in a circle, and movement in a straight line is rendered possible only by the counteracting force of an old man who sits in the stern and steers with an oar. It is one of the most perfect contrivances for wasting labour and obtaining a minimum of result from a maximum of exertion ever invented.’
J. F. Fraser (whose account of the Balkans in 1906 is illustrated by grainy photographs of atrocities, with a dotted line close to the fold, and the instruction: ‘This page can be torn out and destroyed by those who find the pictures too horrible’) claimed that the Ottomans wrote backwards, moved the wood against the saw, and feathered their oars upside down; their officers saluted soldiers, and even bus conductors punched tickets for your boarding stop instead of your destination.
Newcomers often met with unexpected drama. Baron Wratislaw – who was still in his teens, and liked the food – crossed the border in the summer of 1599. A day or so out from Istanbul he gave his ambassadorial suite the slip and went for a paddle in the Sea of Marmara. Being Czech, he had never seen the sea before. He began collecting stripy shells, watched the dolphins sport, and admired a ship which was running in towards the beach; but when his janissaries suddenly caught Wratislaw up and swept him away from the shore, exchanging fire with the sailors, he understood he had narrowly avoided being seized by pirates. They had spotted him from a long way off, and were even now tacking furiously out to open sea in a storm of arrows and curses.* Paul Rycaut had to spend a night among some very tough-looking nomads on the plains of Pergamum: they fed and sheltered him, and sent him on his way next morning, refusing his money and asking him only ‘to speak well, wheresoever I came, of such poor Men, who led their Lives in the Fields, who were instructed in these Principles, viz. to hurt none, and to be humane and helpful to all Mankind’.
Some travellers were amused, some appalled, to discover that their janissary would turn a peasant Greek or Serbian family out of their house for the benefit of the traveller, and demand not only food and wine for himself and his charge, but tooth-rent, too, for the wear and tear of consuming it; and others were shocked by the spectacle of public execution, its methods as grisly as they were impressive; so that one concluded, sotto voce, that ‘the Turks do not jest with malefactors’.
Janissaries
*
The sheer breadth and complexity of the empire around the dawn of the seventeenth century was unparalleled, outgrowing the medieval systems that had been devised to regulate it.
Not since the days of ancient Rome had any state attempted to maintain a standing army, a palace and a bureaucracy on taxes levied on subsistence-level agriculture. At the start of the seventeenth century the Anatolian hinterlands seethed in a state of nearr
ebellion. The frontiers bristled with enemies. In Jerusalem the Ottomans controlled a city revered by every religionist in the known world, friend or foe. In Mecca and Medina they protected the wellsprings of Islam. In the ports of the eastern Mediterranean they bound up the strands of the biggest trade routes of the age. In the Haj they had the biggest organisational headache before Thomas Cook. Of all the nations that the Ottomans ruled – thirty-six, at a conservative count – the Bedouin were the most intractable, the Greeks the craftiest, the Egyptians the most urbane, the Serbs the most vicious, the Hungarians the most wearisomely litigious and the Albanians the only people in the empire whom the Ottomans recognised as a race in their own right – one that seemed to include every pirate, ruffian, cut-throat or swindler under Ottoman rule.
Nearer to home had gathered perhaps the most troublesome student population in the world, and the most intractable soldiery. It was true that the early Ottomans had always welcomed strangers, but one could grow weary of open house; and the man who described the city as full of ‘men with no religion and no faith, tricksters and topers and city riff-raff of no known nation or religion, Turcomans, gypsies, tats, Kurds, foreigners, Lazes, nomads, muleteers and camel-drivers, porters, syrup-vendors, footpads and cutpurses and all kinds of others’ was only gruffly expressing the unease which lay behind the elegant, anxious memoranda served up with growing frequency to the Porte on the causes of decline.
Lords of the Horizons Page 20