Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  In 1609 Ahmet I, who had started the stultifying practice of imprisoning princes in the Cage, began to plunder his empire to create his Blue Mosque. He began work in spite of the warnings of the holy men that a mosque should only be built with the spoils of conquest. The Ahmediye became the first mosque of the empire, the people’s favourite, and is one of the sights of Istanbul today. It has six minarets, which the holy men claimed were uncanonical. The court of the mosque was the biggest in the empire. Yet it seemed to suffer from its own bulk, too, as if the weight of it all had flattened and compressed elements which had come more gracefully to the neighbouring Sulimaniyye, the mosque Sinan had built for Suleyman half a century before. The drum of the Blue Mosque was smaller; the tensions less acute, the patterns less absolutely regular. The entire output of the Iznik tile factories was consumed in its decoration, yet most of the blue interior is only pretending to be tiled, and on close examination reveals itself as stencil work. It was full of ostrich eggs; most mosques were – they were brought back from the Holy Land by pilgrims. It was crammed with lamps. Everywhere there were glass bowls – one containing a little rigged galley, another a model of the mosque, and the rest ‘a great many knacks of that nature’, Thévenot said. The tiles – not all of which were made to fit, and many of them simply plundered from other buildings – were used in bushel-loads – 21,043 in the gallery above the main door alone. So greedy for materials was this mosque that it gobbled all the stone, marble and tiles the empire produced, and building work elsewhere was suspended. And within twenty years an expressive change had come over the iridescent tileware of Iznik. The glowing reds turned brown, the greens slipped into blue, the whites lost their ovular clarity, turning dirty and mottled; and the glazes became gritty. Anatolian tileware never regained its earlier perfection.

  Constantinople in the 1790s

  Constantinople was very tightly packed, and building plots grew zanier by the year. The shores of the Bosphorus were lined with the palaces of successful pashas – Cantemir tells us he snapped one up cheap during an invasion scare in 1684, and after his exile he heard it had gone to a sister of the Sultan. ‘Suppose we combine mosque, minaret, gold, cypress, water, blue, caiques, seventy-four, Galata, Tophana, Ramazan, Backallum, and so forth, together… your imagination will never be able to depict a city out of them,’ wrote Thackeray in 1853, when he thought it droll to make a ‘remarkable catalogue’ of things embedded in the labyrinthine fabric of the city which he didn’t have time to see. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was there in 1717, attempted to describe at a glance all that she did see – an ‘agreeable mixture of gardens, pine and cyprus trees, palaces, mosques and public buildings, raised one above the other’, and by her own admission she fell on ‘a very odd image, [which] gives me an exact image of the thing: a cabinet adorned by the most skilful hands, jars showing themselves above jars, mixed with canisters, babies [small cups] and candlesticks’.

  Was there ever a general more rococo than Shishman, who distinguished himself in war with the Poles at the end of the seventeenth century, and who had a French surgeon scoop his fat out every year, until he finally popped? Was there ever a piling up of years and wives and progeny to equal the achievement of a Venetian of Smyrna, so old that his age seemed to stand for the state of the parties, the country he served and the country he lived in: he was 115 when he died in 1713.* In 1717, after his failure against the Russians at Witowa, the Swedish King Charles XII was forced to flee south, and he arrived in Constantinople as a refugee. For over a year he remained in the city, attempting to work up a Turkish alliance, and to arrange a safe passage back to Sweden. His enemies bayed for his extradition but the Ottomans, in their stiff fashion, blandly refused to give him up. Fate had sent them the Swedish king, and erected the curious diplomatic circus which surrounded him; it was not for them to intervene, and no pleas or threats could change their minds.

  Kicking his heels in exile, Charles developed an interest in archaeology. He arranged to purchase an Egyptian mummy like those the traveller Pietro della Valle had seen when the locals lowered him into a burial pit at the end of a rope. As soon as the mummy arrived in Constantinople, though, the authorities intervened. Of course the Egyptian sands were stuffed with mummies no one had ever bothered either to examine or to protect, but they did not like the king’s enthusiasm. The more they thought about it, the better it seemed that the mummy should not be taken away at all; it was whispered that the very fate of the empire might depend on preserving it. So they confiscated the mummy, and when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited the capital in 1717 it was still languishing, like a very old reprobate, in the notorious Turkish dungeon, the Castle of the Seven Towers, where, incidentally, there was a huge pile of salt laid up by the Byzantines and untouched since the Conquest.

  The Swede was only one of the kings mouldering in the capital; Thokoli, a Hungarian pretender, once lived there on a wine-seller’s licence and a pension of five dollars a day ‘in one of the Vilest streets in the Town … His Countenance much changed, pale, & Fallen, & his Feet Swelled, so that his enemies scorned him.’ During abortive peace negotiations in 1689, both the Turks and the Austrians declared their contempt for him; the Austrians asked that he be handed over as a rebel; but the Turkish envoy explained that he had not travelled so far to become Thokoli’s assassin. The Dutch ambassador, acting as mediator, pointed out that the Turks used him like a dog. ‘Ay, Tekeli is indeed a dog,’ the envoy answered; ‘a dog that lies down or rises, that barks or is quiet, according to the Sultan’s bidding. But this dog is the dog of the Padishach of the Ottomans; and at a sign from him the dog may be metamorphosed into a terrible lion.’ In 1697, anyway, the authorities remembered him. He was stricken with gout, and was just heading off to the baths when they ‘threw him into a Carr like a Log to make him a King’.

  Ottoman artillery parks were a jumble of cannons, some of them immensely old, like the medieval brutes of solid iron which defended the Bosphorus and fired granite balls weighing five hundred weight and which in 1805, after a proper clean-up organised by the French military attaché, managed to drop one smack into a British frigate, so saving Constantinople from a naval bombardment; others new, but unreliable; some captured from Russia, or Austria; but all of them of perfectly random bore. The soldiers had no single calibre of musket, either, and they carried a whole range of bullets to be matched to their guns in the pandemonium of war. Perhaps nothing was more redolent of ancien régime than the sight of an imperial galleon hoving to when it was time for the men to eat. The anchor was weighed, the oars were shipped, the sails were furled: and a dozen little fires might be seen springing up in every cranny of the ship, in the fo’c’sle and on the poop, a cluster of men around the mast, or stirring a pot beneath a companionway on the main deck, each little party in a world of their own, and appreciatively sniffing the good smells emanating from their own mess.

  Whatever clarity had once shone through the empire from its silent centre to its most turbulent frontier, was defracted and mottled like the colours on the Iznik tiles. Darker and darker did the empire seem: more impenetrable its gloom; more helplessly reserved and secretly bewildered its functionaries; more groping and local its arrangements. Each new tax spawned an office to collect and assess it. Even the impeccable surveys of the conquest years and after, which measured the swag and kept it equitably distributed, were largely abandoned in the seventeenth century, so that the empire’s wealth became a half-forgotten hoard itself, whose size could only be guessed at. While the names of fifty thousand janissaries might be found on the payroll, pay books had long since been traded like gilts and the number of men ready or willing to answer a call-up was a conjecture only proved – and usually dismally – by the actual event: for war without success was an expense even the spahis preferred to avoid.

  Turkish guns

  In 1593 John Sanderson compiled a list from information given to him locally to show the population of Istanbul, which arrived at a total of 1,231,207 inhabita
nts; but what is really interesting about this list is the way the census is framed.

  * One of them floated free. She was picked up from the water by a European ship, and ultimately caused a sensation in Paris.

  * Dallam was an organ maker who was sent in 1599 to present the Sultan with an organ from Queen Elizabeth I.

  * In Smyrna, after shipwrecks, piracy, Ottoman avanias (extortionate taxes) and crippling insurance rates for Venetian ships had left not one Venetian trader in the port, Francesco Lupazzoli was born in 1587. He died in 1702. His sinecure as consul was created for him at the end of the 1647–69 war, as a typically cheap Venetian reward; he was already in his eighties. By 1678 only three Venetian merchants traded in Smyrna. The 1680s war forced his retirement: but at its end, in 1699, he bounced back, fit and 112. He ate fruit, bread and water, with some soup and roast meat, and avoided stimulants, milk, snuff and tobacco. His name, Lupazzoli, ‘Lone Wolf’, was singularly inappropriate for a man who had racked up 5 wives, 24 legitimate children – the last born when he was 95 – innumerable alliances and 105 bastards.

  * As an illustration of ancien régime logic, it recalls the entry Alexander Herzen saw being made when he was doing time in the Siberian bureaucracy:

  No of persons fallen in the water …………. 2

  No of persons saved .……………………… 2

  TOTAL …………………………………… 4

  19

  Koprulu and Vienna

  The Ottoman royal line seemed like a Juggernaut against the fractured and random genealogies of the other servants of the empire, but there were other families, all the same. The descendants of the Prophet’s sister were all known as emirs, and were entitled to wear distinctive green turbans. They were allowed to be judged, but not punished, by men. They remained, Cantemir tells us, ‘Men of the greatest Gravity, Learning and Wisdom’ until they turned forty, when they would become ‘if not quite Fools, yet they discover some sign of levity and stupidity.’ The descendants of the vizier who had concealed news of Mehmet I’s death, working his corpse like a puppet, enjoyed the title of khan, and resolutely kept away from affairs of state ‘for fear of losing everything. They have greatest honours paid them by the Sultan, who visits them twice a year, eats with them, and lets them visit him, when he will rise a little from his seat and say peace be with you, and even ask them to sit down.’

  Out in the provinces lived descendants of the old chieftains who had spearheaded the invasions. As late as the nineteenth century Muslim landowners in the valley of the Vistritza, surrounded by feudal retainers, claimed that their lands had been in the possession of their ancestors for more than six hundred years, perhaps as a result of a politic change of faith. In many ulema families, traditions of learning and piety had been handed down from father to son for generations. Endowments were often managed by the descendants of the founder: the gatekeeper at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, for example, remains to this day a descendant of the Muslim appointed to the office in 1135, and may say that his family has seen the Ottomans come and go. Above all the Girays, traditional khans of the Crimean Tartars, had the blood of Genghis in their veins and were, by persistent report, heirs to the empire if the Ottoman line should fail.

  Family loyalties had always existed among the kapikullari, in spite of the slave theory. Suleyman’s young Grand Vizier, Ibrahim, looked after an old Greek sailor who often arrived roaring drunk outside his house. Ibrahim would lead him home, the handsome, smooth-shaven youth, counsellor to the foremost sovereign of Islam, shepherding his drunken old father through the streets of Constantinople. People thought well of him for it, and made no effort to see in the younger man the faults of his father, for they did not hold much by heredity, having proved again and again how carefully selected men could be trained to the pitch of perfection. Family bonds could be carried too far. Suleyman’s last Grand Vizier, Sokullu, was a Serb by birth; he did much to preserve the Sultan’s mystique by keeping alive the memory of Suleyman’s grandeur through the reign of the jovial and worthless Selim the Sot, and into that of his successor; but he was an arrant nepotist, and went so far as to create a Serbian patriarchate for the benefit of a relative. People remembered this when Sokullu was assassinated in 1579 on his way to the council chamber, and they thought it on the whole a just reward.

  In the seventeenth century the pressure to admit the sons of slaves into palace service became irresistible. In 1638 the boy tribute was formally abandoned, and a few years later, in the 1650s, the empire acquired a sobriquet, such as Venice – La Serenissima – enjoyed, or the possibly ironic La Humillima, ‘Most Humble’, by which the Knights of Malta chose to designate their irreducible presence in Valetta. From now on she was known as Baba Ali, or ‘High Gate’, La Sublime Porte. The new name indicated, perhaps, that the Ottomans were settling to the Mediterranean world; but it marked a shift in the balance of power, too, from the Sultan himself, the Grand Turk, to his more anonymous officials, for the Gate in question was in fact the residence of the Grand Vizier. With the boy tribute formally abandoned the way was cleared for the establishment of dynasties; and for fifty years after 1656 the government was controlled by the most famous dynasty of the lot, so sure of itself that one of its members went so far as to contemplate the destruction of the Ottoman line as a means of renovating the flagging energies of the empire.

  Its founder was one of the very last tribute boys, and his career to 1656 was a traditional one. By shrewd alliances and steady service in both Constantinople and the provinces he had reached the position of governor of Tripoli. By the age of seventy-one Ahmet Koprulu was living ‘a private and stoical life at Constantinople, in expectation of even the smallest Bashalic. Indeed he enjoyed the name and honour of a Basha’, but he had few friends in the capital. He was not rich. He found it hard to keep up the retinue expected of a pasha of his rank, and avoided public appearances.

  Only death could free the Kapikulu from his duty of obedience. In 1656 the summons came from the Valide Sultan Turhan, mother of the young Mehmet IV. For the past eight years, grand viziers had followed one another in rapid succession as the factions jostled for position and the office became sacrificial – fourteen grand viziers rolled over as first Kösem and then, after her murder in 1651, Turhan herself clung to the reins of power. The Venetians, in defence of Crete, were blockading the Dardanelles. Shipping was at a standstill and the link with Egypt – commands from the Porte, and grain from the Nile – was broken. On 4 March 1656 the army in Constantinople revolted over pay – further debasement of the coinage was one consequence of the political friability – and demanded the heads of thirty high officials. Turhan gave way, and the unfortunate men were hanged at the gate of the Blue Mosque.

  In desperation, Turhan turned to Ahmet Koprulu. Before accepting the position of Grand Vizier, Koprulu demanded written guarantees that the Sultan would not listen to any court gossip and that no one would countermand any order he might give. Turhan surrendered her regency to him, and the young Sultan Mehmet left Constantinople for the freer atmosphere of Edirne, where he and his successors were to remain for fifty years. Koprulu promptly demonstrated his grim efficiency by executing the pasha who had abandoned Tenedos to the Venetians, suppressing the spahi revolt and purging the corps. But he also beat the Venetian fleet, broke the blockade of the Dardanelles and allowed a return to Tenedos and Limnos. The rebellious George II Rakci, Prince of Transylvania, was summarily replaced by a more amenable ruler.

  Evliya Celebi’s patron, Melek Pasha, was governor of a Black Sea province at the time, and he soon received a letter. ‘It is true’, Koprulu wrote, ‘that we, were raised together in the imperial harem, and are both protégés of Sultan Murad IV. Nevertheless, be informed from this moment that if the accursed Cossacks pillage and burn any one of the villages and towns on the coast of Ozu province, I swear by God Almighty that I will give you no quarter and will pay no heed to your righteous character, but I will cut you into pieces, as a war
ning to the world. Be wary therefore, and guard the coasts. And exact the tribute of grain from every district, according to the imperial command, in order that you may feed the army of Islam.’

  Melek had suffered a brief spell as Grand Vizier himself. Consequently he was not at all offended by the tone of the letter, it rather buoyed him up. Koprulu, he reminded Evliya, ‘is not like other Grand Viziers. He has seen much of the hot and cold of fate, suffered much from poverty and penury, distresses and vicissitudes, has gained much experience from campaigning and he knows the way of the world. True he is wrathful and contentious. If he can get rid of the segban vermin in the Anatolian provinces, restore the currency, remove the arrears, and undertake overland campaigns – then I am certain that he will bring order to the Ottoman state. For as you know,’ Melek added mildly, ‘breaches have occurred here and there in this Ottoman state.’

  In 1665 Koprulu sent the first ever Ottoman ambassador to Vienna, marching into the infidel city under a forest of standards and banners, to the sound of kettledrums and to the consternation of the people. Koprulu was convinced that the breaches could be repaired if only the empire could recapture the military manner, which Koprulu, and others, saw as the real cause of the empire’s former success.

  In the 1640s when Sultan Ibrahim launched his crazed search for ambergris, and furs, two men in the empire dared to cross him. One was a judge in Pera who, dressed as a dervish, declared: ‘You may do three things: kill me – and I shall die a martyr; banish me – there have been earthquakes here recently; or fire me – but I resign.’ The other was a soldier, a janissary colonel adored by his 500 men, who had served in the longest and most bitter siege, of Candia, the capital of Crete, that the Ottomans ever conducted. Black Murad was met off the boat by a treasury official demanding amber, furs and money. He rolled his eyes, ‘bloodshot with wrath’. ‘I have brought nothing back from Candia but gunpowder and lead,’ he thundered. ‘Sables and amber are things I know only by name. Money have I none and, if I am to give it to you, I must first beg or borrow it.’ He escaped a ruse to murder him, and was apparently instrumental in the deposition of the Sultan.