Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  * The Ottomans had originally encouraged them, successfully, as a counterweight to the Italian monopoly of Levantine trade.

  † His men, however, were frequently encouraged to get drunk before battle, better to face the terrifying janissary bands and warcries.

  * In 1718 Tsarina Catherine’s favourite general, Prince Golytsin, led an army of a million men out from Moscow to drive the Turks into the sea, but without supplies, so that 400,000 starved to death without ever leaving Russian territory.

  21

  Ayan

  As the institutions of empire fell into disarray, the kapikullari addled their single-minded devotion to the Sultan’s cause. With the Sultan in their grip, power became something they quarrelled over mercilessly, falling into factions, advancing their protégés, and stabbing each other in the back. The world they made for themselves was far more frightening and uncertain than the world Mehmet had made for them, in which they had been at the mercy of the Sultan’s will.

  In Constantinople, the poet wrote, ‘are the ranks of glory and honour / Anywhere else life is frittered away.’ The sultans believed otherwise; in the latter half of the seventeenth century they abandoned their palace in Constantinople for the security and pleasaunces of Edirne, where they could hunt in the parks. In 1703, though, the mob marched on Edirne; they deposed Mustafa II on 22 August, and released his younger brother from the kafes where he had lived for the past sixteenth years. Ahmet III was then installed in the palace, which had become a prison where he exclaimed against the practice of sending forty pages to attend him in his bedroom. ‘I do not feel at all comfortable if I have to change my trousers,’ he complained; ‘I must ask my sword-bearer to dismiss them, keeping only three or four men so that I might be at ease in the small room.’

  ‘The rumour of the Sultan’s death has spread down to the very children; and a riot is expected, accompanied by a sack of shops and houses as usual,’ wrote the bailio in 1595. ‘I have hidden the embassy archives and brought armed men into the house …’ When a coup, or a mutiny, or a massacre closed down the shops, sealed the bazaars, and silenced the talk in the cafés – ‘sad it is to see the aspect of this city’, wrote Emo, the bailio in 1731 – and when soldiers patrolled the empty streets, and the nights were punctuated by the boom of cannon, signalling that some unfortunate had been tossed to the waves – the atmosphere was oppressive and tense.

  The panache and abandon of the empire in its golden days had given way to the stifling confinement of the Cage, the stagnation of the borders, the dark warren of streets, the pent-up hours of the harem. All this resembled slavery of the galley; and it fostered and irritated the idea of nationhood – until the empire seemed a prison of the nations, too.

  It was Rycaut in the seventeenth century who called the Ottoman court ‘a Prison and Banniard of Slaves, differing from that where the Galley-slaves are immured, only by the Ornaments and glittering out-side and appearances: here their Chains are made of Iron, and there of Gold and the difference is only in a painted shining servitude, from that which is a squalid, sordid and a noisome slavery.’

  The Kiosk of Processions was built into the palace walls, from where the Sultan was expected not only to watch the colourful parades of guildsmen, but to listen to the complaints of the multitude. The officials could do nothing to close this aperture upon the wider world, and although they curated the Sultan according to their own lights, and arranged the manner in which he was displayed to the public gaze, through the blanket of court ceremonial they could always hear the terrible baying of the mob outside and the thunder of the cauldrons overturned, the bass notes of popular power and discontent.

  From the high window of the Kiosk traitors and criminals were thrown to meet the fury of the mob; and so were officials who had incurred their displeasure. On April Fool’s Day 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montague wrote: ‘The government is entirely in the hands of the army and the Gran Signor as much a slave as any of his subjects … Sh’d a reflection on [a minister of state’s] conduct be dropped in a coffee house (for they have spies everywhere) the house would be razed to the ground. But when a minister here displeases the people in three hours time he is dragged even from his master’s arms. They cut off his hands, head and feet … while the Sultan (to whom they all profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dare neither defend nor revenge his favourite.’

  Again and again, the designs of the Porte were thwarted by the rabble. Again and again, the state stamped down on all the symptoms of dissent: in 1712 the newfangled coffee houses were closed, as notorious centres of unrest; in 1756 a number of janissaries who had been caught smoking had pipes stuffed up their noses and were led in derision through the streets of the capital. But the mutinous Kaffeeklatsche were soon in full swing again, and the soldiery clung insolently to their pipes and pouches.

  The empire swarmed with the dispossessed, churned up in the chaos and devaluations of the early seventeenth century. Ever since the borders had closed, the ruling classes had turned to squeezing the lower orders for the plunder and riches which warfare no longer seemed to bring.

  ‘This miserie abroad will make us love our owne Countrie the better when we come thither,’ an Englishman consoled himself in 1612, after making a trip through the eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire. No longer was it perfectly safe to travel the Sultan’s highways. The poor felt their poverty more keenly, perhaps; but on the way to Jerusalem from Aleppo in 1604, an English traveller found a village so poor that when he gave them his bread they ‘blessed God that there was bread in the World’. As taxes rose, ordinary country folk ran away or surrendered their rights to some powerful local ruler. Increasingly they turned to piracy and banditry. All over the Balkans, men melted into the woods and vanished into the mountains to prey on travellers and villagers, and at least once the government considered torching the forests of Chalkydike near Thessalonica to flush them out.* The exploits of klephts or heyducks were sung in ballads like those of the uskoks before them, and the bandit way of life itself became traditional: and though inevitably – armed and desperate – bandits were instrumental in furthering the nationalist rebellions which broke out from the late eighteenth century, at heart they belonged to the decline of the old order, not the eruption of the new – very like the armatoles, or local police, whose business it was to round them up.

  It was often hard to say who was klepht and who was armatole, for both sprang from local stock, and were involved in the game of protection and intimidation. Many of them wanted nothing better than a fair deal and a quiet life. Urquhart was finally seized by brigands in northern Greece in 1835, but in four hours flat he had them pleading that times were very bad when honest men had to turn to this sort of work to make a living (and they actually turned on a curmudgeonly Albanian colleague who seemed intent, notwithstanding, on slitting Urquhart’s throat and taking all his money). ‘Woe is me! I’ve married a robber!’ shrieked the heroine of a Balkan play when the simple herdsman she had married put on his guns. ‘Now every man is become a robber,’ he grimly pointed out. But bandits were bandits, too.† Robert Curzon in Albania could only think that ‘the natives do not shoot so much at Franks because they usually have little worth taking and are not good to eat’; and shortly before the First World War Noel Buxton, MP, pretended to the Turkish Ambassador that he was going to the Balkans as a cure for a weak throat. ‘It is not a very good place for throats,’ the ambassador replied drily.

  The grander the larceny, the more eagerly the authorities sought to negotiate. When pashas themselves stooped to criminality, it could not be long before criminals, in their turn, were being made pashas, and in the provinces by the end of the eighteenth century it was often unclear who was the bandit and who the governor, so complex and negotiable had Ottoman rule become.

  In Constantinople the rulers of the empire kept a weather eye on the rise and fall of cliques and households, but they lost interest in distant provinces, over which they were losing direct
authority. The old system of timariot soldiery led by the local sancakbey had been replaced by cash revenues remitted to the Porte by the beylerbeyi, men who controlled whole regions, and were in a better position to oversee the business of raising revenues. So much for theory. The money was an irresistible temptation: many compounded timars and hass revenues dropped out of the system altogether, and were attached by sleight of hand to various offices and persons in authority, from beylerbeyi and their provincial aides to the innermost functionaries of the court – the Black Eunuch and his harem women not excepted.

  If at times the provincial rulers did their best to elude the grasp of Constantinople, they still required its mantle of legitimacy. Sultans – or their ministers – used an unpredictable network of personal alliances to secure the loyalty of their more powerful subordinates. Pashas were given royal brides, so that the old seventeenth-century Sultanate of the Women is sometimes called the ‘Sultanate of the In-laws’.* Hasan Pasha in 1720 declared himself lord of Babylon: ‘seized the province after fifteen years of deriding and eluding the Porte,’ the bailio wrote, and ‘reigns as a sovereign, although he sends each year the customary tribute to the Gran Signor. So great is the dissimulation of this Government that it does not declare him a rebel and constrain him with force, but communicates with him, shows confidence in him, and honoured him a short time ago by creating his son Pasha at the premature age of seventeen.’

  Hajji Ali Haseki’s governorship of Athens in the late eighteenth century was so tyrannical that a joint deputation of Greeks and Turks made their way to the Grand Vizier in Istanbul to protest, and a band of farmers threw their ploughshares at his feet and begged to be given land elsewhere. Hajji Ali was dismissed, but he was the lover of the Sultan’s sister, and he bribed his way back into the governorship a few years later, banishing his Turkish opponents, stealing land, forcing men to labour for him, and driving half the population of the city to flight. An Athenian abbot who attempted to register his protests in Constantinople met Ali there by mischance, and took coffee with him; he soon realised his mistake when ‘his beard fell off and his teeth were injured’. It was the death of the Sultan’s sister which caused Hajji Ali’s downfall; he was exiled to Kos, and finally beheaded.

  Often the Porte would simply stipulate a sum it expected to receive in dues, and leave it to the local notable to apportion the taxes in his locality, so that a system which had once operated only in very remote and awkward places became general in the seventeenth century. All sorts of people were drawn into this devolution of power – priests, kadis, traditional chiefs like the Serbian knez or the kapitanos of Muslim Bosnia, truculent officials. The central authorities also began ridding the capital of as many janissaries as they could, posting them to garrisons around the empire; when their pay faltered they began to impose themselves in familiar style upon the local town. They were especially common in Bosnia and Serbia, but by 1792 more than half the male population of Salonica was enrolled in some janissary regiment. All these local power groups formed a dangerous counterweight to the corruption and timidity of the central authorities, whose governors in the provinces were apt to behave like guests of honour, benign spectators to the show.

  The fertile chaos of appointments and usurpations, frequently winked at by the central authorities, led to the emergence of local dynasties of ayan, Lords of the Valleys:* as if the state itself was too exhausted to climb the mountains and traverse the passes which divided them all, in such a corrugated and ridged terrain.

  Ali Pasha the Albanian, one of the most absolute and terrifying of the ayan, ruled his pashalik as a monarch for twenty years. Born locally in Janina in 1745, he carved out lands for himself by trickery, daring, terror, cruelty and cheek which straddled much of southern Albania, northern Greece, and Macedonia, and he freely negotiated with foreign powers on his own account. Sometimes you feel that his whole career was darkly devoted to wreaking vengeance on the Suliotes, who had once abused his mother, a real witch; sometimes, that he was a modern tyrant, working in difficult times, who made the roads good and understood trade. He winningly asked Henry Holland to stay on as his physician, and to name his fee. Of course Holland declined, so Ali asked him instead for a good undetectable poison. He enjoyed a kind of popularity, preventing anyone from oppressing his people except himself; while he and the Porte together successfully pretended that he was just the man they meant to have, and in the perfect spot. Whether he used the Porte, or defied it, it was only in the early 1820s that the rupture between them became open and unavoidable. The old Lion of Janina was still firing on his enemies, exhorting his troops, and swearing a terrible vengeance, as Ottoman soldiers came pouring into his house; and he was so magnificent that they shot him dead, not face to face, but by firing muskets through the floorboards.

  Under these conditions, as ordinary people grew poor, others became significantly rich. For every village enserfed, there were individual villagers who rose through soldiering, tax collection, moneylending, trade, muleteering, or the amassing – at the expense of the peasantry – of hereditary estates. The economic convulsions of the seventeenth century gave way, in the eighteenth, to increased trade and unequal prosperity: conditions of social turmoil and demographic change which were mirrored, perhaps, in the more lively movement of the plague from city to city in the wake of troops and trade.

  The plague epidemic generally began in Constantinople in April and May, climaxed in August and subsided in October: ships took it to Cairo and Alexandria, caravans to the Balkans. War spread pestilence: in 1718 the Tartars brought it to Belgrade; in 1738 a Russian army contaminated in Moldavia carried plague across the Ukraine, while Austrian armies diffused it through the Banat and Hungary. Sometimes it arose unexpected and unexplained, devastating in a season whole cities which had considered themselves safe for generations. Always it seemed to strike hardest at regions already reeling from crop failures, earthquakes, or the passing of the army. In contrast to sixteenth-century population growth, the seventeenth century saw numbers shrink, with the decline most pronounced in the countryside as people fled for security to the towns. There, unfortunately, they were likely to meet the plague; but in the Balkans the proportion of Christians in cities grew enormously, nonetheless.

  A German had noticed in 1553 that almost every house appeared to be of the same value as the next, and ‘of wood, single storeyed, built directly on the ground and on a level with it, without underground cellars’ (lawless Albania was an exception: here houses were shaped like towers, and the living quarters were approached through a trapdoor). By the end of the eighteenth century the Greek village of Ambelikya, which produced the dye called Turkey red, was home to a group of dye merchants with branches in Vienna and London; their grand and ornate houses still survive. In 1787 a Greek businessman of Siphnos left his wife and children shares in olive trees, a vineyard, three ships and a boat; in mischief or wisdom, he saw to it that his wife got the stairway down to the river, and one daughter the iron pier at the bottom.

  The growth of a money economy had been presaged at the end of the sixteenth century by the army’s demand for professional paid infantry; but while the Ottomans themselves developed sticky fingers, they were not clever with money. ‘They are great wits at times,’ della Valle wrote in the early 1600s, ‘but in business we always make them pause, because, do what they wish, they know far less about it than we others do.’ Whatever funds they possessed were spent on climbing the ladder. Service in the bureaucracy, the army and the mosque was their defining role as a ruling caste – for they were not a nation, or a geographical entity. Of course there were exceptions – like the governor who argued that a pasha ought to engage in trade, to lessen the burden on the people – but Turks with any pretensions were rentiers through and through, and always hoping for promotion and rewards they used their money to attain positions enabling them to carve off a slice of the wealth that was being created under their noses.

  Unlike the aristocracies of the West, who ultim
ately moved into trade, finance and production, the Ottomans still saw wealth as plunder, to pile up in glittering heaps. War tended, overall, to serve and stimulate the economies of Western Europe, but in the Ottoman Empire it was the other way about.* The economy served war. The Ottomans made requisitions as they had done when the empire’s wealth was spread at the Sultan’s disposal, and most fighters could sustain themselves. So there was a market price, and a requisition price, and the best producers suffered most. Culturally the Ottomans were cut off from the people in their empire who were parlaying their labour into capital, and their capital into a good return. Increasingly the minorities invested in trade, production and even land – people who by definition had no role in the political process. The Ottoman state did not see promoting trade as its business, nor, by the eighteenth century, would it have had enough influence to do so; so that the endeavours of home-grown capitalists remained, by the standards of Western Europe, relatively small-scale: great riches were never very secure in the empire anyway. Stealth and intrigue allowed the Ottomans and their minorities to benefit from each other, to an extent; and who you were always counted for less than who you knew.