In the days of his power Ali Pasha of Janina had been unpredictable. His charisma, like his cruelty, was satanic: Byron was utterly charmed by him, and wrote to tell his mother so. And he at last gave Henry Holland a strongly worded passport, ordering his people to treat the traveller as they would Ali himself. The sanction for this was not the Koran, nor the Sultan, nor the judgement of the court. At the bottom of the scroll, dark and weird and more quixotic than any of these, flared out the terrible incantation, ‘Do this, or the Snake will eat you.’
‘The empire will be destroyed’, wrote Mustafa Ali (1541–1600), when ‘our descendants will say that kanun is what they decide.’ But actually it shuddered on, patched and strung together, exploding here, reviving there, into an age when western visitors, far from marvelling at the system, sought to surprise their readers by finding evidence of any system there at all. Among them, though, were a handful of romantics who observed that the random and sporadic violence of the Ottoman Empire, while regrettable, was as likely to be offset by acts of random generosity and wisdom. Urquhart, who travelled widely in Albania in the 1830s, thought that the flexibility of Ottoman rule contrasted favourably with conditions in the West, where the relentless cruelty and ugliness of industrialisation had the full backing of the law. He believed that the personal nature of power in the empire supplied it with automatic checks and balances, and encouraged a perpetual dialogue between power-holders. When Urquhart pondered the childish ease with which rebel chiefs and rivals were invariably lured to their own doom, he concluded that revolts originated with a person, rather than with a principle, and that the betrayal of every rebel leader was ‘the result of the same daring and decision upon which alone their authority depends’. Negotiation was always the order of the day; complaints were aired, grievances addressed, and a resolution invariably found that was agreeable to all the parties. How preferable, he thought, to the blind injustice daily inflicted on his own countrymen by the grindings of an implacable system.
If men were not perfect, the Ottomans felt, there was much to be said for having men in power who took a pecuniary interest in everything that went on around them. An official who sold offices, a farmer of taxes, a commissar discreetly on commission or simply a predictable judge* would have made his pile already, and his ‘eye was full’, content with a little gentle squeeze that made him thoroughly reliable. It was only men who declared their honesty who frightened everyone. For a certain length of time they would hold themselves aloof: justice deferred, business at a standstill, while everyone knew that their resolution was bound to fail, on salary; and then they became very rapacious indeed, to make up for lost time.
* The woods were as full of hives as men – until even the bees began to experience overcrowding, and were sent to sea in little yachts, in which the swarms cruise about in the adjoining gulfs of classical renown; rifling the sweets of their respective coasts, and exhibiting that superiority over their continental neighbours which is always assumed by a maritime people’.
† The Swedish artist Otto Magnus von Stackelberg was taken by Albanian bandits in northern Greece, who entertained him by singing:
There were forty brigands, sitting on Olympus
forty cold nights long.
Their jackets rotting on their bodies
were smeared with black blood.
Bo! Bo! the night and the moon.
* The continuity of Ottoman rule in Buda, for example, was provided less by the four pashas who ruled there in the late seventeenth century than by Atike, Mehmet IV’s younger sister, who married each of them in succession.
* No one, by now, could count themselves lords of the hills, which were riddled with bandits.
* The seventeenth-century population explosion made trouble for the Ottomans, as much as its subsequent contraction.
* ‘They tell us of some rare examples in Turkey of uncorrupt judges,’ Porter wrote. ‘I have heard of one, but I have known none.’
22
Shamming
‘Decline’ is perhaps a bankrupt term for describing the Ottoman experience in those years. The old system grew more complex and differentiated after the shocks it received in the early seventeenth century; more purposeless and ordinary and modern. The timar cavalry were degenerating largely because the empire was turning itself into a cash-based society. Power in the provinces lay ever more in the hands of the local notables: their understanding of conditions was invariably more acute, and they relieved the central authorities of the burden of providing effective government in every case. The state was broken into cliques, which excited much bitter comment from those who lost out; but patronage, here as elsewhere, was a form of meritocracy: one man sent the brilliant ten-year-old Ali Corlulu Pasha to court, to extend his networks, ‘as a spacious theatre, in which his virtues might shine; and, by being his patron, enlarge one day his fortune’. He was Grand Vizier between 1706 and 1710. Eighteenth-century scribes wrote on poorer paper than their seventeenth-century predecessors, but with greater detail and accuracy. Men of the pen seemed to be taking over from men of the sword – and so they were in every major European state.
Only peasants, everywhere, were the losers, as the world shifted from the quiet of medieval agrarianism into a more busy, bossy, opportunistic age. In the empire they were pressed by the growing class of landowners who compiled the peasants’ smallholdings into large estates; by ranchers who drove them off with threats and sabotage – like stopping their access to water; or by the nomads who began pushing into regions where settlement was already in decline.
New compartments were added to society, blurring the old simplicities which had placed the reaya on the one hand and the Ottomans on the other, with a thin layer of holy men and merchants in between. But a society which could sustain landless sharecroppers, moneylenders, local bigwigs, independent artisans, and dynasts at every level of state service, was recognisably closer to the kind of society into which modern Europe, too, was evolving.
The problem lay with the Ottomans themselves. The ancient formulas, the old practices, the shape and direction of the Ottoman state underwent no parallel development. ‘May the stretching shadow of the Sultan’s grandeur and authority be extended from the reaches of the width and breadth of the world to the highest heaven, and may the cordons of the tent of his prosperity and majesty be firmly tied to the God-given tent pegs,’ an Ottoman ambassador wrote sanctimoniously in 1776, as he set off to negotiate a deservedly humbling treaty with the Russians. It seemed hardly necessary to add that ‘the effect of his auspicious accession to the throne was a bounteous gift of spring to the rose garden of the world’, but the ambassador did so; unaware of course that this particular bounteous gift of spring was to die fighting with his own officials in 1807, leaving his kaftan, spattered with blood, to hang as a chilling memento of Ottoman decay in the Topkapi museum.
The gap between theory and reality grew wider with every passing year. Too many people owed their living, not to the real world, but to the sham of it, from the Sultan down, in his sham omnipotence; through the government, with its pretence of controlling the empire; the janissaries in the guise of soldiers, the ulema, in the sham of everlasting Islamic victory; governors, in the sham obedience from which they derived their legitimacy. Thousands of people came to work in the palace every day, but only about twenty of them performed significant tasks. Dozens of provincial governors were seconded from the palace whose real job was to keep their nargiles alight and their noses clean. They counted themselves lucky to live peaceably within their own four walls, and left the task and rewards of government to some local cabal or gang of bully-boys, received fanciful instructions from Constantinople and gave fictitious answers. Athens fell gratefully under the protection of that powerful arbiter of harem affairs, the Chief Black Eunuch, and sometimes managed to get unpopular governors dismissed; and on one such errand a merchant called Dimitri Paleologus spoke so well that the Chief Black Eunuch drew a silver inkwell from his secretary’s belt an
d gave it to him, saying, ‘Take this inkpot, and from today I appoint you governor of Athens.’ Doubtless the Chief Black Eunuch, who had never left the harem, let alone seen Athens, was pleased by his own perspicacity and style; but poor Dimitri, who lived in the real world, was appalled. He was killed as soon as he returned to Athens, by a league of outraged Turks and jealous Greeks.
The veil of fantasy was tough and widely spread. Anyone who could get a handle on power or money in the real world could generally parlay it into the style of the sham world, too, and any number of imperious local tyrants were escorted by horsetails and janissary guards, lording it over the Balkans whenever the regular army was off the scene, ‘marching like princes in cloth of gold and silver; their handsome Tartar horses groomed by their concubines, who followed them to the field dressed in man’s apparel’.
Double-entry thinking, though, was a waste of talent, and produced an insurmountable backlog against which all energies frittered themselves away. Nothing was more impressive, Eliot thought, than the air of industry and importance surrounding a pasha at his work: the corridors lined with petitioners and summonees; the pasha himself dealing with a dozen bits of business all through the interview; a vast amount of scribbling and dictation from which he is unable to tear himself away. But Eliot knew better. ‘Though the Turks write inordinately, they take no care of their papers, and as a rule merely stuff them into bags and throw them away after a month or two.’
Even the economy of the Turkish language, which can express ‘I love’ in one word and ‘I really do love’ in another, had suffered from the Ottoman taste for erudite allusions – the hallmark of an educated gentleman. It became involuted and obscure: its references secondary and arcane, its allusions merely allusions to allusions. Of course all those terrified slaves had gibbered in their native tongues: Ottoman Turkish was a creaking make-believe so truffled with Arabic and Persian, written so inappropriately in vowelless Arabic that many years later ‘it was said that during the Turco-Greek war many Turkish soldiers wrote to their families in Anatolia, saying that they were wounded and requesting remittances, but that these requests, when written down by a professional letter-writer and deciphered by the village sage, were thought to be a statement that the sender of the letter was well and saluted his friends’.
At a minor level there was a lot of fibbing and pretence, all the more obvious now that every European diplomat maintained a string of inside informers. Pork was forbidden in Constantinople, but foreign ambassadors bought permission to bring pigs into Pera for Carnival on the sly: the pig was run into town by night, and whisked through the streets to the embassy by rushlight. Europeans reported unanimously that high-ranking Ottomans flocked to their table for wine and went off half tipsy, and when challenged would say, like the Mufti of Aleppo, with becoming hauteur, that the prohibition did not apply to great men who knew when to stop. Busbecq remembered an old fellow who used to shout violently on the point of raising a glass to his lips, to warn his soul ‘to betake itself to some distant corner of his body so that it would not participate in the crime he was about to commit’. Edward Dodwell’s sketching picnics on the Acropolis in 1805 were constantly interrupted by the arrival of the Athenian governor, who referred to his artistic new friend as ‘Pig, Devil and Buonapartist … and seldom failed to drink a greater part of our wine: observing that wine was not good for studious people like us’. As for Byron, he wrote in his Athens journal: ‘The Voivode and the Mufti of Thebes supped here and made themselves beastly with raw rum, and the Padre of the Convent being drunk as we, my Attic feast went off with great éclat.’
But Muslims in liquor, like lascivious priests, are humbug’s stock-in-trade, and the tulipomania which swept the court in the 1720s reveals a more material flight from reality. The tulip was the emblem of the Ottoman royal house, worked into textiles and inlay, and celebrated in poetry: the romantic tulip of Central Asia, that is, a lyre-shaped flower with pointed petals. For a brief period at the end of the seventeenth century the tulip’s sway in the Ottoman garden was challenged by melons and cucumbers; but under Ahmet III in the 1720s it came back into favour with a frenzy which recalled, in its less sordid aspects, the tulipomania of mid-seventeenth-century Holland.
The Dutch mania had been a speculator’s bubble. In Turkey tulipomania came to symbolise the hedonism of the court. Sultan Ahmet III had so many children that with all the births, circumcisions and daughters’ weddings a permanent holiday atmosphere reigned in the Seraglio. ‘Let us laugh, let us play, let us enjoy the delights of the world to the full,’ wrote the court poet Nedim, a particular favourite of Sultan Ahmet’s. Grizzled old kapudan pashas stooped tenderly over the bulbs with little trowels; the head gardener laid his executioner’s tools aside, and dazzling were the nightly displays in the palace in the fleeting growing season. The French ambassador described such an evening at the house of Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha in 1726:
When the tulips are in flower, and the Grand Vizier wishes to show them to the sultan, care is taken to fill the gaps where the tulips have come up blind, by flowers taken from other gardens and placed in bottles. Beside every fourth flower is stood a candle, level with the bloom, and along the alleys are hung cages filled with all kinds of birds. The trellises are all decorated with an enormous quantity of flowers of every sort, placed in bottles and lit by an infinite number of glass lamps of different colours. These lamps are also hung on the green branches of shrubs which are specially transplanted for the fête from neighbouring woods and placed behind the trellises. The effect of all these varied colours, and of the lights which are reflected by countless mirrors, is said to be magnificent. The illuminations, and the noisy consort of Turkish musical instruments which accompanies them, continue nightly so long as the tulips remain in flower, during which time the Grand Seigneur and his whole suite are lodged and fed at the expense of the Grand Vizier….
For ten years the whole of Constantinople gave itself over to illusions of fairyland. Giant turtles bearing flickering candelabra paddled through the Seraglio grounds. ‘Sometimes the court appears floating on the waters of the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn, in elegant caiques, covered with silken tents; sometimes it moves forward in a long cavalcade towards one or another of the pleasure palaces… These processions are made especially attractive by the beauty of the horses and the luxury of their caparisons; they progress, with golden or silver harnesses and plumed foreheads, their coverings resplendent with precious stones.’
At the back of it all, though, lay policy desperate and inspired: it was all the handiwork of a single Grand Vizier, Damad Ibrahim Pasha, who feverishly worked the silken threads. Damad Ibrahim assumed office in 1718, and after Ahmet had kept his Grand Viziers turning over every fourteen months for twelve years it was a credit to his capabilities that he stayed in office until 1730. He waved his Sultan away on a froth of loveliness and poetry; presented his Sultan with the cynosure of pleasure-domes in Sa’adabat, the ‘Palace of Happiness’, upon the shore of the Golden Horn known as the Sweet Waters of Europe; and threw his own lavish party to celebrate his wedding to the Sultan’s sister. But behind the dazzling displays he was hard at work upon affairs of state; desperately papering over the cracks which had widened in the humiliations of Karlowitz in 1699 and Passarowitz in 1718.
So, ironically, the so-called Tulip Period of Ottoman history refers not merely to the sensual abandon of the court, but to the administration’s first efforts to form a more sober view of the West. It was not only in their search for more and more lovely blooms that the Ottomans sent to Holland and to France; nor idle fancy that saw Sa’adabat modelled on the French châateau of Marly. In 1719 Ibrahim sent an ambassador to Vienna, and in 1721 to Paris, with instructions ‘to make a thorough study of the means of civilisation and education, and report on those capable of application.’
These inspired a little burst of Frankishness, in deference to the old French ally – French gardens, décor and furniture, matched by an equivalent Fren
ch mode for turqueries. But in 1720 a French renegade also organised a fire brigade in Istanbul. In 1729, more significantly, a Turkish printing press was allowed, for the very first time, to operate in Constantinople. It was run by Ibrahim Muteferrika, who was born in Kolosvar in 1674 and destined for the Calvinist ministry, but was taken into slavery in 1693 and sold in Constantinople. He converted to Islam and made a career for himself in government service. With the help of Said Celebi, the son of the ambassador to France, he petitioned the Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim for permission to establish his press, and succeeded in getting the ulema’s approval to print books of a non-religious nature. Initially he received Jewish help; later type and presses were imported from Leiden and Paris. Seventeen books in all were published between 1729 and 1742, when the works closed down, including a Turkish grammar in French, an account of the ambassador’s French sojourn, a treatise on syphilis and one on the tactics of European armies.
The lovely illusions of the palace, as well as the more realistic approach to the West, all came to a bloody end, of course. Damad Ibrahim did what he could to suppress grim news arriving in Istanbul from the Persian front, but not everyone can be fooled all of the time. In 1730 popular opinion at last drove the Sultan and his Grand Vizier to gather an army at Scutari, on the Asian shore, and there, instead of marching out, they dallied in disgraceful parley with Persian negotiators in an effort to bring the war to a close.
An Albanian called Patrona Ali, a janissary dealing in secondhand clothes, led a street rebellion that September, denouncing the Sultan’s luxuries and infidel ways. Sa’adabat was destroyed by his mob. The Sultan hastily served up the Grand Vizier Ibrahim to the bowstring, but he was soon deposed himself, and returned to the Cage in favour of his nephew, Mahmut I, who was girded with the sword of Osman on 1 October 1730. For several months Patrona wielded immense power, stumping into the palace every morning while the elegant functionaries of the court waited, cowering, and the janissary rolls leaped from 40,000 to 70,000 men. Patrona stuck to his rags and common ways for longer than anyone had expected; but power did finally go to his head. When he demanded to have a butcher who had once lent him money appointed Hospodar of Wallachia his charisma shrivelled up. He lived a few days more, and then was ambushed in the palace by men who had despaired at last of his ability to rectify the system.
Lords of the Horizons Page 27