The millet ordered all people by their faith, but regions half-gazi by geography remained in a state of near-permanent local warfare, like Albania, Bosnia or Crete. Metropolitan Sunni orthodoxy could no longer impose itself on the borderlands as squarely as it had done in the days of Selim the Grim and Suleyman. Constantinople exiled its mystics to such places, and there suffered their enthusiasm; so that through the medium of a more warm-hearted, if heterodox, Islam, conversions to the faith – in Montenegro, too, and among the Bulgars of the Rhodopes, the so-called Pomaks – took place en bloc in the later seventeenth century. Crete became a powerful Islamic centre, and almost the entire population had turned Muslim within a century of the Ottoman conquest. By the eighteenth century some Albanians had become so confused that they ‘declare they are utterly unable to judge which is best, and go to the mosque on Fridays and the church on Sundays’.
This sliding between religions was very common. In the old town of Charrah, in Syria, the Christians shared their church of St Nicholas with the Turks, each taking an aisle apiece; ‘though Turks don’t pay for the oil in the lamps they sedulously burn’. Muslims were so impressed by the ritual cleansing that accompanied a Christian baptism that they frequently sent their lepers to undergo it – ‘acceding to Christian rites, as so often, in case they were useful, or had some good in them’. From a cave on Lemnos, the Greeks dug their ‘Lemnian Earth’, or Goat’s Seal, on the feast of the Transfiguration, 6 August. They made it into cakes, stamped with characters, and used it as a cure for dysentery, snake-bites, and a salve for wounds. ‘This custom’, Busbecq wrote, ‘the Turks observe, and they wish the service to be performed today just as the Greek priest has always performed it there, while they themselves remain at a distance as spectators only. If you ask them why they do this, they reply that many customs have survived from antiquity, the utility of which has been proved by long experience, though they do not know the reason; the ancients, they say, knew and could see more than they can, and customs which they approved ought not to be wantonly disturbed.’ In Athens when the rains had failed, the Turks would go up to the old temple of Olympian Zeus and pray, and if the drought persisted, they would bring up a flock, separate the ewes from the lambs, and there begin ‘a loud and general supplication in the most pathetic tones’, backed up by the ‘plaintiff bleating’ of the sheep, designed to ‘give greater effect to the petition and move the pity of heaven’. Once when the case was really hard the pagan negroes who dwelt on good terms with everyone in the caves and ruins under the Acropolis were asked to beseech their gods, as well.
In the spirit of animism which underlay all faiths, Albanian songs allowed a pillow to tell a woman where her husband had gone, or a ship to stop in its tracks, horrified by the groans of a prisoner. The common people held writing in very high regard; they would pick up waste paper and thrust it into a chink in the wall, in case it contained Koranic verses, for there was a legend that on the fiery path to heaven your feet would be protected by all the paper you had saved in your lifetime. Busbecq’s janissaries were very upset by the use his entourage put paper to. Mottoes – ‘O God’, ‘O Protector’ – were inscribed on buildings, and men and animals wore amulets containing little scraps of paper with effective words, such as the ninety-nine names of God, and other tried and tested talismans.
The weather, too, was more than a single polity could reasonably expect to bear. Lovely as the Balkan slopes might look in summer, a Balkan winter froze men as they stood. Hungary was full of autumn mud, as was Istanbul itself in winter; though in summer there people strained for the light airs that might play through their kiosks on the water’s edge. In 1894 barely a tree was in leaf in Istanbul before the second week in May, when it suddenly became terrifically hot. In 1428 the ice in the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn was so thick it broke down the sea walls. In Arabia, where the temperature could reach 120°F by day, it would drop to a little above freezing when the sun went down. Newcomers to Greece might be warned against sniffing the hyacinths and narcissi, whose fragrance was ‘so strong as to hurt those not used to it’. (Hundreds of our garden plants and flowers were rifled from the hills and gardens of the Ottoman Empire: roses, tulips, narcissi.)
The Mediterranean was beset by weird and vicious winds with old names, by sudden squalls and atrocious winters, though it maintained, much of the time, a placid appearance, all the better to tempt and deceive. Arabia was the most pitiless of deserts. Egypt was five regions in a single year, according to Amrou, for out of the Nile’s ‘prolific slime’ came ‘a powdery desert, a liquid and silvery plain, a black and slimy marsh, a green and waving meadow, a garden blooming with flowers, or a field covered with yellow harvests’. In the Sultan’s own backyard, Anatolia, there were frozen peaks and scorching plains and coasts whose cliffs dropped, not only sheer and buckled and scored by rivers, but black, too, into the sea.
No river journey was as hair-raising as the journey down the Danube – ‘this method of travelling will some day prove disastrous’, Busbecq queerly said when he was sent in 1554 to negotiate an end to wars which had left the region strewn with corpses. No border was as convoluted as that of the Ottoman Empire, no garrison since Hadrian built his wall and staffed it with Spaniards so lonely as the Hungarian one; no conflict so ingrown as that between the Sultan and the Shah, whose respective borders, unbeknownst to them, were fixed for ever in 1615, with the casus belli so far forgotten in the mists of time that in the eighteenth century Cantemir understood it to be the horrible Persian habit of rubbing their feet with their dry hands first thing in the morning rather than washing them. No encounter in history was more deceptively ingenuous than the arrival of the first Russian ambassador bearing furs, and hoping for trade relations; no barber, Edward Brown believed, so versatile as the barber of Edirne, who could do a man’s hair just the way he liked to wear it: ‘The Greeks preserve a ring of hair on the centre of their heads, and shave the rest. The Croatian has one side of his head shaved, and the other grows as it will. The Hungarian shaves his whole head, except his foretop. The Polander has his hair cut short. The Turk shaves his whole head, save a lock. The Franks wear their hair long amongst friends, and in public tuck it up under their caps.’ The Tartar horseman had thick useful hair which protected him against weapons and bad weather, without the need for a hat.
The Ottomans had a genius for pageantry – for all that was improvised and evanescent. ‘I think’, wrote Ambassador Porter, ‘that the dignity of our position is marred by the juniors’ constant running after shows etc.’ Mean and crabbed the streets of the capital might seem to the visitor; very disappointing after that first thrilling view from afar; but the Turks put far more effort into temporary displays than into solid architecture, and at festival times the city transformed itself. A triumph of arms might be celebrated by the bazaars staying open all night for a week, and at Ramadan, when the fasting was over, the city exploded into merry life. Swingboats were put up under canvas, decorated with leaves, flowers, festoons and tinsel, and to the tinkling of bells and music men would swing you ‘high into the air, to touch the stars; and this is surely a mad sport …’ There were festive gates erected over streets, and jousts, and contests in which youths shot arrows and flung javelins on the fields of the Atmaidan, and tried to surpass the mark. The seventeenth-century traveller della Valle, seated up on one of the gaudy beribboned swings, gyrated so wildly from side to side that the people cried out for his safety; and he was forced to pretend that it was all deliberate, and to swing even more crazily to impress the ladies, before the spectators grabbed his legs. ‘I believe they play like this’, he said, ‘because, as they say, the angels do so.’
Going down to the Atmaidan, young Baron Wratislaw fell in with a bunch of Turkish youths trying their hand at archery and the javelin – ‘very merry fellows’, he recalled. Here is Evliya Celebi, scribbling the last of his 735 descriptions of the procession of the Constantinople guilds – ‘By the Lord of all the Prophets, God be Praised that
I have overcome the task of describing the guilds and corporations of Constantinople!’ – which Murad IV ordered to parade before him in 1638:
All these guilds pass in waggons or on foot, with the instruments of their handicraft, and are busy with great noise at their work. The Carpenters prepare wooden houses, the Builders raise walls, the Woodcutters pass with loads of trees, the Sawyers pass sawing them, the Masons whiten their shops, the Chalk-Makers crunch chalk and whiten their faces, playing one thousand tricks … The Bakers pass working at their trade, some baking and throwing small loaves among the crowd. They also make for this occasion enormous loaves the size of the cupola of a hamam, covered in sesame and fennel, carried on waggons which are dragged along by seventy to eighty pairs of oxen. … These guilds pass before the Alay Kosku with a thousand tricks and fits, which it is impossible to describe, and behind them walk their sheikhs followed by their pages playing the eightfold turkish music.
On and on the guilds come, showering the spectators with their gifts of tamarinds and ambergris, of confectionery and little fish; even the gravediggers pass, ‘with shovels and hoes in their hands, asking the spectators where they shall dig their graves’. Even the thieves, the beggars and the lunatics go by, followed, as the lowest of the low, by the tavern keepers, disguised in suits of armour, the Jewish tavern keepers ‘all masked and wearing the most precious dresses bedecked with jewels, carrying in their hands crystal and porcelain cups, out of which they pour sherbert instead of wine for the spectators’.
Even the women of the harem could look forward to celebrations and feasts to mark every significant event; and via illuminations, shadow plays and processions, the palace was linked to the city, and the city came to the palace. As late as 1821 the French performing troupe les Viol Frères did their act for the ladies of the harem, and spread their threadbare rug upon the floor of a vast chamber, before an invisible audience. An odd sensation it was for them, performing to a blank screen; but when Claude, the youngest and most agile of the brothers, finally made his terrific acrobatic leap and somersaulted to the top of the human pyramid, he found himself looking over the screen; his eyes met those of a voluptuous odalisque, the merest glimpse of whom meant death; his confidence wavered, the pyramid shook, and they collapsed in confusion of bruises and muffled curses.
The Turks were an earthy people. They adored picnics. They loved to escape the confines of the city and eat as one might in paradise, in the shade of trees, with running water close at hand. Many travellers were struck by the romantic beauty of an Ottoman cemetery, always well sited, perhaps on the slope of a hill dotted with slender cypress trees, the gravestones tilting, untended, but all expressive, so the visitor thought, of eternity, and decay.
Sweet Waters
Busbecq cites several examples of the essential harmony which ruled Ottoman life: above all, he observes their cleanliness, both at home, where they used the hammam, and in camp, where rubbish and excrement were always buried. They had no scruples against eating meat – ‘they declare that the sheep is born for the butcher’s stall; but they do not tolerate that anyone should take pleasure in its agony’. The Prophet once cut off his sleeve rather than disturb a cat, and the Turks protected animals by law. When Greece achieved its independence in the nineteenth century, Edward Lear found the Turkish border town of Larissa thick with storks, all seeking Ottoman sanctuary from the neighbouring Greeks, who preferred to shoot them. Songbirds were kept in cages, of course, but there was a place near the Atmaidan in Constantinople where you could pay to have a bird released, and a Venetian goldsmith was once roughed up by the crowd when for a joke he pinned a living bird to the lintel of his shop. Men came through the streets with smoking offal on a stick, which you could buy to throw to the stray dogs, and to Baron Wratislaw’s amusement all the cats of the city came prowling out for their regular evening charity. In Sivas, someone had set up a charitable foundation whose sole purpose was to provide food for the birds when the snow lay thick on the ground.
The fauna of the empire was overwhelming. There were jackals and hyenas whose urine was much prized as an aphrodisiac. There were bears who could climb trees after you, and wolves which roamed Balkan villages in winter. In Greece the swallows were believed to be so crafty that they arrived each year on the back of storks. In Serbia flies could kill a horse (‘the smallest fly that ever I did see, covered with a thin Fluff, or Down’, Rycaut reported in amazement). The Albanian flea, on the other hand, ‘has been called “the biggest and fattest in the world”’ . The croaking of Edirne’s frogs could drive the most reluctant sultan away from the city and back to his palace in Istanbul; itself a city where the very skies were so thick with life that if you stood in the street and tossed a scrap of food into the air, ten to one it would never hit the ground. The English traveller Fynes Morison met Europe’s first giraffe in the city in 1597: ‘he many times put his nose in my necke, when I thought my self furthest from him, which familiarity I liked not’, he reported rather churlishly. In the 1770s one old admiral, who maintained very strict order in the fleet and closed down taverns, kept a tame lion which he took for walks, amused by the way it frightened the Mufti, the chamberlain and various ‘effeminate eunuchs’ who were obliged to visit him. Eventually the lion grew ferocious, and took to biting Europeans; when it turned on its master, too, the sultan confined it in the royal menagerie, where Horace Walpole saw it in the 1790s.
Busbecq discovered his lodgings to be infested with weasels, snakes, lizards and scorpions. Pleased by the amusement the weasels gave him, he brought in monkeys, wolves, bears, stags, common deer, young mules, lynxes, ichneumons, martens, sables, and a pig ‘whose society, according to the grooms, is very good for the horses’. He had eagles, crows, jackdaws, strange kinds of ducks, Balearic cranes and partridges that hung about his feet and pecked his satin slippers. (The lynx fell in love with one of Busbecq’s men, and eventually pined away from grief at his absence; while the Balearic crane fell for a Spanish soldier Busbecq had ransomed. It followed his every move, searched for him with piercing cries if he ever went out, knocked at his door with its beak, and on his return ‘would spread its wings and rush to meet him with such absurd and ungainly movements that it seemed to be practising the figures of some outlandish dance or preparing to skirmish with a pygmy. As though this were not enough, it finally made a habit of sleeping under his bed, where it actually laid him an egg.’) Suleyman celebrated the capture of Buda by tracking down all the beasts in the royal hunting ground, and it took him two visits with hounds and falcons to exterminate every bear, tiger, jackal, boar, gazelle, panther and hyena in the park, with countless pheasants, partridges and pigeons.
The cities were full of animal noises, the screech of gulls, the flapping of storks, the swish of kites, the barking of dogs, the mewing of cats; and you may still hear for yourself that the cockerels of Turkey do not ‘cockadoodledo’ at all, but follow the drawn-out cadence of the muezzin. The noises of Constantinople were the howling of dogs on the shore, the flutter of birds’ wings as they were released from cages by pious men, three Bulgarians having an argument, porters running uphill and shouting a warning, the chink of coins in the market, the bubbling of coffee in the bazaar, the notes of a lute drowning the Sweet Waters of Asia, the bray of a bumpkin, a Christian’s apology. The cry of hawkers, the spitting of camels, the flapping of wet fish, the clatter of pattens, the call of the muezzin, the chanting of the Mass, the clash of Anatolian cymbals, the thunder of tugs, the flute, trumpet, horn and kettledrum of the Mehter bands, the special yell of the deli.
The call of the muezzin sounded over Eger and Sarajevo and Istanbul; over Sofia and Bursa and Mosul; but Hungary was the pounding of hooves; Arabia, the wind; Epirus, shots in the street; Ragusa, the running of oars through a galley port; the Balkans, the echo of a loosened stone on a hillside; Attica, the drone of bees; Sarajevo, the groan of a camel; Mecca, the murmuring of the faithful at prayer; Gallipoli, the wingbeats of storks in flight; the Danube, the cras
h of rocks; the plains of Konya, the skirl of cymbals; the Rhodopes, the wail of pipes; Athos, male chants; Salonica, the lamentations of Jewesses at a funeral; Serbia, the grunting of pigs in oak woods; Ankara, the bleating of goats in the herbage; all highlands, the clanking of sheep bells; all lowlands, the snorting of buffalo; all palaces, the growl of a panther; every city, the yelping of dogs.
Into this cacophony one might throw the clamour of the dead and gone, whose monuments littered the landscape and gave it the feel of a silently gibbering madhouse, full of baffling claims and inexplicable characteristics. Some, like the pyramids, or the standing men of Anatolia, were vast and peculiar. Others, like the columns of Athens, seemed to a traveller like Evliya Celebi to be scarcely of this world, so perfectly were they fitted together.
Pierre Gilles, an antiquarian who first visited the capital in 1544, made a fruitless search for the remains of the old Stoa Basilica of the Byzantine emperors, and stumbled across the Cistern instead:
Through the inhabitants’ carelessness and contempt for everything that is curious, it was never discovered except by me, who is a stranger among them, after a long and diligent search. The whole area is built over, which made it less suspect that there was a cistern there. The people had not the least suspicion of it, although they daily drew their water out of the wells that were sunk into it. By chance I went into a little house where there was a way down to it and went aboard a little skiff. I discovered it after the master of the house lit some torches and rowed me here and there across the pillars, which lay very deep in the water. He was very intent on catching his fish….
But in Balkan fields stood rum old stones whose regenerating properties were respected by everybody. There were shrines to Christian saints which received not only Muslim adulation, but Muslim priests and caretakers. Muslim or Christian, everyone around Skopje knew the place where an inscribed stone lay buried, and knew that if ever it were dug up the rain would never stop. By the river in Athens young girls left salt, honey and bread on a plate on the first night of a new moon, murmuring some forgotten words and wishing for ‘a pretty young man’: at the very spot, classicists averred, where a statue of Aphrodite had once stood. There were whole lost cities into which no one ventured at night, and to which the Turks, in their last, febrile moments, were to add Ani, and the Montenegrins Stari Bar. In Egypt there was the Valley of the Kings, tombs into which Pietro della Valle had himself lowered; and Istanbul was itself a charnelhouse of the past, with its Roman cisterns and Byzantine mosques and eerie, serpent-twined columns.
Lords of the Horizons Page 21