Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The glories of the Levantine world were only Ottoman tradition; and the centuries of peace and discretion of an imperial kind were over. On 4 November 1922 the last Sultan accepted the seals of office from his ministers, seals of a power which had been wielded in his name for six hundred years. Frightened and alone, he asked the British high commissioner for safe passage from Istanbul. He died at San Remo on 15 May 1926, and was buried in Damascus. The last Caliph died in Paris on 24 August 1944. He was buried in Medina.

  * Slade’s critique of the Tanzimat, or reform, influenced the Young Ottoman movement of the 1860s and 1870s, along with the works of Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and the Koran.

  * Bravely, for he was sure he was going to be shot.

  * All sorts of ceremonial and traditional accretions stuck to the Ottoman line as they rolled on through the centuries, including a number of curses: one at least uttered by a sultan on his own descendants.

  * His body was examined by sixteen foreign and Turkish physicians, all but the doctor from the British Embassy agreeing on a verdict of suicide.

  * One Hajji Ali, a Lebanese, did develop a camel corps in America for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. He was known as Hi Jolly and his tomb, a pyramid topped with a camel, still stands in Quartzite, Arizona.

  Epilogue

  For hundreds of years street dogs prowled, fought, and lay snoozing in the sun, forcing pedestrians to step over them as best they could, or pass by in the gutter, and every visitor from della Valle onwards heard them howling on the Pera shore at night. The Ottomans considered dogs unclean, but they accepted their presence in the divine plan, recognised their habits, and never called them strays. For centuries the dog’s meat men sold skewered offal for the pious to give out, and whelping bitches were sure to receive a porridge of scraps even in the city’s dankest quarters. It was not unusual for a Turk to leave a small bequest for feeding the dogs in his street; but the Armenians and Greeks often fed them poisoned meat on the sly.

  The dogs kept the Ottoman cities relatively clean and wholesome, converting the rubbish into the shit scooped up by the tanners’ men, for processes noxious and arcane; in Constantinople Byron claimed to have seen two dogs actually tucking into a dead body under the Seraglio walls, though in Bursa, that exquisite city, they left the cleaning chores to jackals, who scavenged in the streets by night. Thornton was not alone in finding them very loyal to their doggy parishes in the capital, rather like Stambouliots themselves: they never crossed the line, even ‘in the attack on the passenger, whom they deliver over at their frontier to be worried by the neighbouring pack’. There is evidence to suggest that by the late nineteenth century there were 150,000 dogs in Istanbul alone: one for every eight inhabitants. But the dogs were not attached to people; only to the few blocks or streets they considered home.

  They suffered the odd upheaval. Nasuh Pasha, Grand Vizier to Ahmet I, had all the street dogs sent over to Asia in boatloads, ‘from concealed motive’. After the loss of Buda, the imperial greyhounds were turned loose ‘and suffer’d to run without a Master through all the streets of Constantinople’, as the Sultan sought to disassociate himself from an image of indolence and hunts. The fortunes of these aristocratic hunting dogs were closely bound up with those of their janissary masters, and vice versa: the name the reformist Grand Vizier Alemdar Pasha gave the new modern army he raised in 1807 meant ‘dog-handlers’. Outside the city walls dogs worked, of course: like the Hungarian condor, or the vast Carpathian sheepdog. Macedonian shepherd dogs were no doubt descended from the brutes who killed Euripides at Pella; and the Albanian dogs were a law unto themselves, seeming to obey the same harsh codes as their masters, who protected them with the absolute loyalty for which Albanians were notorious. ‘I remembered first a serious bit of advice given me by a British consul,’ recalled J. F. Fraser, who was attacked by ‘two brutes of goat-dogs’ outside Ohrid in the early 1900s, ‘never to shoot a dog belonging to an Albanian goatherd unless you are prepared immediately afterward to shoot its master before he has time to shoot you.’

  The dogs of the cities – Salonica, Istanbul – were your true curs, sly, lazy, lively, flea-bitten and battle-scarred. Edward Lear disliked them. ‘Such vile beasts they are, like old, mangy wolves: if I were Sultan for but one day wouldn’t I send for 10 boat loads of dogs’ heads!!’ Right up to the Crimean War – the war through which the West made its overwhelming entry into the Ottoman world, snapping up its concessions, availing itself of its hans, sneering at its benighted superstitions, and pushing its loans – Ottoman street dogs maintained their ancient purity, and were alike in every town and city in the empire. Perhaps they were nomads at heart. Legend had it that they came to Constantinople with the Turks in 1453; and their indolent behaviour ever after recalls Eliot’s observation that the nomad seeks rest when he stops, not dancing. They were about the size of a collie, fierce-looking, tawny, with bushy tails and pointed ears. (The Crimean War brought all manner of foreigners into the empire, and left the breed underfoot slightly more erratic.) Like soldiers on furlough they lived rakishly, snoozing in the sun by day, and howling by night.

  Very few people ever seem to have been bitten by one of these dogs; though when one English gentleman, impressed by their intelligence, tried to rear a litter of puppies in London, they grew savage and had to be put down. Probably they only gave up their territory to move in congenial company, perhaps recognisable in an American gypsy’s lament for the coming of the automobile, recorded in New York in the 1950s by Joseph Mitchell: ‘And the yellow gypsy dogs that we don’t even have no more, they would lie down under the waggons and scratch their fleas. These gajo dogs you see in New York, the women practically nurse them, I despise those dogs. When they bark, yah-yah, they don’t even sound mad. They sound sick. A yellow gypsy dog, even a baby one, when he barked he sounded like an old bear.’

  In their own country they observed the proprieties, and never thought of going into shops or restaurants, preferring to wait patiently in the sun for some well-wisher to bring them something to eat. A terrier brought over from England once escaped from its mistress’s hotel, dashed into the street, and was guarded by all the street dogs of the neighbourhood; they even made up a posse to rescue him from a neighbouring pack when he was foolish enough to cross the line, and brought him safely back to the hotel. At the end of the nineteenth century a dog on Davey’s street was so very thin, and super-long, that everyone knew her as Sarah Bernhardt. One day she became very ill; a doctor friend of Davey’s gave her some medicine, and from that day on she remained unswervingly attached to him, and ‘in a hundred ways she showed her appreciation of his medical skill’, including dragging him away by the coat to admire her new litter in a box around the corner.

  They had, you might say, a rather static view of the world; and the forces of modernity certainly could find no place for them. Mahmut II finished off the janissaries, refashioned all his pashas as ministers, brought in the fez and the Stambouline, and had the dogs swept off the streets of Constantinople and shipped out to an island on the Sea of Marmara. It was all window dressing, though: the ministers became pashas again, the Grand Vizier was restored, and the dogs swam back.

  In the last years of the empire, a French firm offered half a million francs to turn 150,000 street dogs in Istanbul into gloves. The Sultan – very hard pressed for cash – nobly refused. But the Ottoman world was relentlessly changing. In 1888 the famous Pera Palace Hotel opened to service the needs of passengers off the Orient Express from Venice, which arrived at the newly built Sirkeci station on the Golden Horn. Traffic in the city became speedier, and mechanical. The street dogs now loafed about tramlines, fell asleep beneath the wheels of stationary omnibuses, and flopped down in the path of speeding cabs. They became three-legged, and worse.

  By 1918 the Sultan no longer possessed any authority. Women were going to university, a military cabal still ruled the empire, the First World War was just ended, and in Turkey another war – for Turkey itself �
�� was about to begin. The Board of Hygiene, too, had all but done its work. The drains were laid. There were asphalt roads, and pavements, so that mud and garbage had become discrete items to be picked out and avoided, except by the dustbin men who rode up and down the streets on collection day on smart new Davis refuse lorries from America. Mangy and lazy, three-legged and obtrusive, the dogs of Istanbul were rounded up again. It took five days, with nets and bait and leashes. They did not shoot or poison them, or get in touch with the enterprising French glove company, for perhaps within the empire’s shrunken breast there remained a suggestion of that modesty which shrinks from forcing violence on the world, an echo of those Turkish curves. The dogs were locked up in an old tramp steamer and transported, howling and fighting, to a waterless island off the southern Marmara coast, where they were turned loose. And this time they never tried to swim back.

  Ottoman Sultans

  1 Sultan Othman I, Ghazi the Victorious, son of Erthogrul Shah 1300–1326

  2 Sultan Orkhan, Ghazi the Victorious, son of 1 1326–1360

  3 Sultan Murad I, Ghazi the Victorious, son of 2 1360–1389

  4 Sultan Bayezid I, Ilderim the Thunderbolt, son of 3 1389–1403

  Interregnum 1403–1413

  5 Sultan Mohammed I, son of 4 1413–1421

  6 Sultan Murad II, son of 5 1421–1451

  7 Sultan Mohammed II, el-Fatih, the Conqueror, son of 6 1451–1481

  8 Sultan Bayezid II, son of 7 1481–1512

  9 Sultan Selim I, Yavouz the Ferocious, son of 8 1511–1521

  10 Sultan Suleyman I, el-Kanuni the Legislator, the Magnificent, the Sublime, son of 9 1521–1566

  11 Sultan Selim II, Mest, the Drunkard (or Sot), son of 10 1566–1574

  12 Sultan Murad III, son of 11 1574–1595

  13 Sultan Mehmet III, son of 12 1595–1603

  14 Sultan Achmet I, son of 13 1603–1617

  15 Sultan Mustapha I, son of 13 1617

  16 Sultan Othman II, son of 14 1617–1622

  15 Sultan Mustapha I, son of 13 1622–1623

  17 Sultan Murad IV, Ghazi the Victorious, son of 14 1623–1640

  18 Sultan Ibrahim, son of 14 1640–1648

  19 Sultan Mehmet IV, son of 18 1648–1687

  20 Sultan Suleyman II, son of 18 1687–1691

  21 Sultan Achmet II, son of 18 1691–1695

  22 Sultan Mustapha II, son of 19 1695–1703

  23 Sultan Achmet III, son of 19 1703–1730

  24 Sultan Mahmud I, son of 22 1730–1754

  25 Sultan Othman III, son of 22 1754–1757

  26 Sultan Mustapha III, son of 23 1757–1774

  27 Sultan Abdulhamid I, son of 23 1774–1789

  28 Sultan Selim III, son of 26 1789–1807

  29 Sultan Mustapha IV, son of 27 1807–1808

  30 Sultan Mahmud II, The Reformer, the Great, son of 27 1808–1839

  31 Sultan Abdul Mecid, son of 30 1839–1861

  32 Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz, son of 30 1861–1876

  33 Sultan Murad V, son of 31 1876

  34 Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II, son of 31 1876–1909

  35 Sultan Mehmet V Resat 1909–1918

  36 Sultan Mehmet VI Vahideddin 1918–1922

  37 Abd-ul-Mecit II, Caliph only 1922–1924

  An Ottoman Chronology

  1281 Osman Bey born.

  1321 Ottomans reach the Sea of Marmara.

  1326 Byzantine Bursa falls.

  1349 Ottoman troops ferried across the Dardanelles into Europe.

  1361 Murad I takes Edirne from the Byzantines.

  1371 Ottomans reach the Adriatic.

  1378–85 Ottomans occupy Anatolia from Kutahya to Amasya.

  1389 Murad I defeats Serb-led Balkan alliance at Kosovo.

  1402 Bayezit the Thunderbolt taken prisoner by Tamerlane at Ankara.

  1402–13 Interregnum, as Bayesit’s sons jockey for sole rulership.

  1448 Second battle at Kosovo consolidates Ottoman rule in the Balkans.

  1453 Mehmet the Conqueror takes Constantinople.

  1454–81 Greece, Trebizond, Crimea conquered: Black Sea becomes an ‘Ottoman Lake’.

  1481 Ottomans land at Otranto, southern Italy; recalled by Mehmet’s death, and Prince Cem’s rebellion.

  1517 Selim the Grim takes Syria and Egypt.

  1521 Suleyman the Magnificent takes Belgrade.

  1523 Suleyman takes Rhodes, effectively securing the eastern Mediterranean.

  1526 Suleyman destroys Hungarian resistance at Mohacs.

  1529 First siege of Vienna.

  1532 Siege of Guns; failure to reach Vienna.

  1543 Barbarossa winters in Toulon with the Ottoman navy.

  1555 Peace of Amasya with Persia.

  1566 Suleyman the Magnificent dies; his son Selim the Sot is enthroned, ushering in the period of harem dominion known as the Sultanate of the Women, which lasts until about 1656.

  1570 Capture of Cyprus.

  1571 Sea battle at Lepanto destroys the Ottoman fleet.

  1577 Renewed war with Persia.

  1579 Sokullu Mehmet Pasha, Grand Vizier under three sultans, assassinated.

  1589 Mutiny of the janissaries.

  1592 Islamic Millennium.

  1595 Under the law of fratricide, Mehmet II has his nineteen brothers and twenty sisters strangled.

  1603 His successor Ahmet I breaks the law of fratricide; his brother, aged two, is allowed to live.

  1606 Treaty of Szitvatarok with Austria, ending the Long War, accords the Habsburg Emperor titular equality.

  1609 Work begins on Sultan Ahmet Cami, the Blue Mosque.

  1622 Janissaries depose Osman II.

  1623–40 Murad IV restores order, and captures Erivan and Baghdad.

  1645–69 Siege of Venetian Candia, capital of Crete.

  1648 Janissaries depose Mad Ibrahim.

  1656 Grand Vizier Ahmet Koprulu begins the restoration of Ottoman discipline.

  1661 His son Fazil Ahmed succeeds him as Grand Vizier; dies 1676.

  1683 Second siege of Vienna ends in the rout of the Ottoman army.

  1699 Peace of Karlowitz. Ottomans accept loss of the Peloponnese to Venice; Transylvania and Hungary to Austria, as far as the Danube; Podolia and southern Ukraine to Poland; Azov and lands north of the Dniester to Russia.

  1718 Peace of Passarowitz leaves Belgrade in Austrian hands.

  1720–30 First Ottoman ambassadors reach Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Warsaw; first Ottoman printed books.

  1730 Patrona rebellion in Constantinople against taxation and western influences: Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha strangled; Ahmet III deposed; Tulip Period ends.

  1739 Peace of Belgrade with Austria: Belgrade regained for the empire; the news forces Russians, campaigning in Moldavia, to sign a separate peace.

  1767–76 French Baron de Tott retained to modernise army, especially artillery corps.

  1769 War with Russia renewed.

  1774 Treaty of Kucuk Kainardji with Russia ‘awards’ Crimean Tartars independence; Russians maintain bases on the Black Sea; disputed article appears to cede Catherine the Great the right to intercede on behalf of all the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects.

  1779 Russia annexes the Crimea.

  1826 Auspicious Event: massacre of the janissaries by Mahmud II.

  1828 Introduction of the fez – surrounded by judicial, military and administrative reforms on more western models.

  1830 Greek independence.

  1833 Russian armies undertake the defence of Istanbul against rebel Egyptian troops: recalled after intense European pressure.

  1839 ‘Noble Rescript’ promulgated, a liberal charter of legal, social and political rights, to inaugurate Tanzimat or Reorganisation. All creeds and races pronounced equal. Minorities consequently liable to military service, which outraged Muslims. In the event, its implementation was patchy.

  1853 Nicholas I writes of ‘a sick man’. Ottoman Empire declares war on Russia, which develops into the Crimean War of France, England and the
empire against Russia. Ends 1856.

  1856 More specific imperial rescript issued. Growth of Young Ottoman movement for reform.

  1875 The empire declares bankruptcy. Balkan uprisings.

  1876 New Constitution announced. Serbia and Montenegro declare war.

  1878 Treaty of Berlin – to which Ottomans are not invited – establishes partial Bulgarian autonomy.

  1880s Egypt begins a strategic slide into becoming a British protectorate.

  1895 Wholesale massacre of Armenians, with state connivance.

  Last Ottoman province in Balkans, Macedonia, disputed between Macedonian revolutionaries, Bulgarians, and Turkish irregulars.

  1908 Mutiny of troops in Monastir, calling for restoration of the constitution. Committee of Union and Progress triumphs; universal outpourings of fraternity and hope.

  Austria–Hungary formally annexes her protectorates, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bulgaria declares total independence under a tsar. Crete unites with Greece.

  1909 Muslim counter-revolution thwarted by CUP with Salonikan troops. Abdul-Hamid deposed by parliament.Constitutional sovereignty adopted. CUP’s modernising policy also secular and nationalistic. ‘Turkification’ alienates Arabs, Albanians.

  1912 ‘Big stick election’ establishes virtual CUP dictatorship. Italy seizes Libya. Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria launch joint assult on Macedonia. Salonica taken by Greeks, narrowly pre-empting Bulgarians.