The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  “Have you heard? The Padishah will arrive today.”

  “They say he has already decamped at Üsküdar.”

  “I have it from a reliable source at the palace. He will not be home until tomorrow morning.”

  As he trudged across town the black eunuch named Narcissus paid no attention to the whispers. In his position as chief steward to the Sultan’s mother, the Valide Sultan, he was party to every detail of the monarch’s itinerary, both at home and abroad. Suleiman kept in daily contact with his mother. When he was on campaign, he wrote to her every day. When he was in residence at his walled domain in Topkapi Palace, he visited her daily at the Old Palace where she ruled his harem. During his long absences on campaign, he appointed her his Regent. And because Narcissus had this great lady’s complete confidence, the black slave knew everything she knew, every intimate detail of her life including the precise hour at which her son would cross over the Bosphorus from the staging area at Üsküdar to parade through the streets of the city.

  Like all eunuchs, Narcissus tended toward obesity. It was a long, hot climb for him from the harem to Topkapi Palace. But Narcissus soared above the buzz of the streets, buoyed by the vast sea of rumor and gossip that surrounded him. As he climbed the steep winding road to Palace Point, rivulets of perspiration ran down his plump face. Partly it was the unseasonable heat of the autumn day that made him sweat, partly nerves. Periodically he would reach down to pat into place the small pouch that hung from his girdle. That silken sheath contained an item that, should it be discovered, could cause great distress to the sender. As for the effect of such a discovery on the messenger, Narcissus shuddered at the thought of the beating he would suffer if the pouch at his waist were to fall into the hands of some officious palace guard. He could feel the sting of the bastinado on the soles of his feet just thinking of it.

  Once he had reached the summit, the overheated slave took a moment to wipe his brow, plan his next move, and survey the scene that stretched out before him. Many years ago when this summit was captured from the Byzantines by the Ottoman conqueror, the peak had been flattened to accommodate a citadel — the last stand, if need be, for the defense of the city. But seven decades of Ottoman rule had slowly erased all evidence of its military past, and now, viewed from its towering Imperial Gate, Topkapi Saray stretched ahead in an adjoining series of three enclosed courtyards, each separated from the other by a gated wall. Behind the massive ramparts that enclosed the entire saray there was no single structure to house the monarch. Instead each court contained a scattering of airy kiosks and pavilions dotted about like stone tents, giving the whole place a closer resemblance to a nomadic encampment than to a European-style palace.

  Narcissus encountered no difficulty passing through the Imperial Gate into the first of the palace’s three courts, a huge rectangle that extended for a thousand feet called the Procession Court. Traditionally every citizen of the Ottoman Empire — slave or free — had the right to petition the Sultan in his palace. As a consequence, the Procession Court was always packed with a generous sampling of the palace clientele: petitioners on foot, ambassadors bearing gifts, carts loaded with twittering Circassian virgins, and hundreds of palace personnel scurrying about like a colony of ants, all weaving their way between horses and groups of swaggering Janissaries in white turbans and yellow boots.

  A keen eye could also spot the occasional ghostly figure of one of the Sultan’s security guards, who went by the name Men in Black because they did double duty as hangmen and executioners, hangings and executions being a routine part of life in the First Court. What was missing from the scene on this day was the fairly common sight of a severed head on an iron spit, thrusting up out of the conical top of one of the towers of the medieval gate, left there to blacken in the sun as a warning to anyone who incurred the Sultan’s displeasure.

  In this mélange, one single, fat, black eunuch hardly merited attention. But at the next gate, the so-called Gate of Welcome at the far end of the Procession Court, two tall crenelated towers silently proclaimed the end of public access and the beginning of extreme vigilance. At the Gate of Welcome (who among the sober Ottomans could have chosen this ironic designation for the site where the occasional human head is mounted on a pike?), all must dismount except the Sultan himself and, of course, his mother, the Valide Sultan. Even the Grand Vizier dismounted at the Gate of Welcome and walked into the Second Court in his stockings.

  Although the Gate of Welcome presented a direct entry to his destination, Narcissus had no intention of risking an encounter with its notoriously unwelcoming guardians. Instead, once through the gate he veered sharply left toward the old Christian Church of Irene, which was currently enjoying a Muslim incarnation as an armory. Smooth as an eel, he slithered in and out among a number of small kiosks toward the outer wall of the palace beyond the church.

  A devotee of beauty, the pleasure-loving Narcissus was sorely tempted to linger a moment and enjoy the gardens, scattered with flowers, shaded by casual groupings of orange trees, bisected by winding paths, spicy with the scent of jasmine, and soft to the foot. These were the touches that gave the palace its cognomen, the Abode of Bliss.

  But Narcissus had no time for bliss. He headed straight for a small opening in the outer wall known as the Boot Gate, which he had been told was likely to be unguarded this day. Everyone in the Sultan’s service had been conscripted to help prepare the capital for the victory parade. With a good part of the palace staff thus seconded to the procession route, it was all but certain that he would find an unimportant post like the Boot Gate neglected. And, to be sure, when Narcissus pushed aside the vines that concealed the little arch, he found it completely unmanned and was able to stroll unhindered into the wild moraine beyond the walls.

  Here, in stark contrast to the manicured palace grounds within, the terrain had reverted to its true nature: a rock-strewn, prickly undergrowth with only the occasional neglected orchard to recall the days when the early Ottoman sultans raised fruit for their tables in their own backyard. In this virtual wilderness, Narcissus could traverse the full length of the palace grounds outside the walls, unimpeded by the guardians of either the Gate of Welcome or the last of the three gates, the Gate of Felicity. There, at the end of the summit, he only had to scale the wall to regain access to the Sultan’s private grounds undetected.

  Narcissus was well acquainted with the dense thicket that surrounded the citadel and quickly located the outer pathway known to its familiars as the Eunuch’s Path, so-called because it was customarily used by palace slaves bent on errands of dubious legitimacy. When they spoke among themselves of this walkway, the students in the dormitories of the School for Pages located in the Third Court told tales of sneaking along the Eunuch’s Path in the dark night and being tripped, pricked with thistles, and beaten bloody by the evil jinn who hide out in tree trunks.

  Narcissus was not put off by such tales. As he zigzagged between patches of light where the sun slanted down through breaks in the foliage, he was secure in his knowledge that jinn never operate by daylight, only by night. What did frighten him were the Janissaries who stood guard over the Third Court and would as soon kill an intruder as look at him.

  An even more immediate concern was how he would scale the wall to get back into the palace grounds. Would it still be there, that ancient, creaky fruit ladder that had served him and so many before him?

  Narcissus sank to his knees and uttered a short prayer: Please let the ladder be in its place. Having been raised a Christian, he had never fully espoused the religion to which he was converted by the circumcision knife. He did not read the Koran, did not pray five times a day, had never been to Mecca and did not plan to go. But he did ask the Prophet for help when he needed it. And today the Prophet, in his mercy, obliged. There, propped up against the stump of a dead pear tree, stood the old ladder. The poor thing was so ancient that no one had ever judged it worth removing.

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p; Taking care to move silently, Narcissus carried the ladder to the wall, making certain he was not within sight of the guards in the wheeled kiosk that patroled the hillside. Then he mounted the creaky ladder step by careful step, pulled the ladder up behind him, and repositioned it on the inside of the wall. When the pages of the Sultan’s school executed this part of the manoeuver they simply jumped from the top of the wall to the soft ground below. But Narcissus was no athlete, and he had to go carefully so as not to soil or damage his caftan, a gift from the Valide Sultan.

  Mind you, Narcissus had not decked himself out in his best finery today out of vanity. His costume was a stratagem. If by chance he should be stopped by one of the Third Court vigilantes and called to account for his presence in that oh-so-private enclave, the gold-embroidered caftan might be his best protection against harassment. The relationship between the white eunuchs of the palace and the black eunuchs of the harem was touchy at best.

  The white slaves felt superior because the Sultan had chosen them to watch over his person. The blacks claimed higher status because the Sultan had chosen them to watch over his most prized possessions — his women. An expensive caftan that marked the wearer as a highly placed personage in the harem would put him several moves ahead in any confrontation that might develop with the Sultan’s Janissary guards. So it was not as an adornment but rather as a piece of interpersonal armor that Narcissus had donned his priceless caftan today.

  When he dropped safely to earth inside the grounds, the way was quite clear for him to advance directly to his destination, the School for Pages, a structure built up against the Gate of Felicity. The Sultan took a deep, personal interest in his pages. Like his treasure, his doctor, and his holy relics, he liked to keep them close at hand. Hence the presence of the School for Pages, the Treasury, the Doctor’s House, the Pavilion of the Blessed Mantle, all within calling distance of his selamlik in the Third Court.

  A quick glance at one of the sundials that decorated the grounds told Narcissus he was on schedule. Excellent. The Sultan’s gerit team practiced hurling in the athletic field behind their dormitory every day before the last prayer. “You are sure to find Danilo del Medigo there if you don’t dawdle on the way,” he was told before leaving the harem. And indeed, when Narcissus rounded the corner, there stood before him a row of twelve handsome young men lined up facing a battery of dummies, each page bearing a long pole with a sharp point — the Turkish lance known as the gerit. Among them, Danilo del Medigo was easily identified by his mop of yellow hair, which stood out in stark contrast to the dark locks of his teammates.

  In gerit training, hurling was practiced separately from horsemanship. When the team competed in a true gerit contest, the players were mounted on fine horses and hurled their gerits at flesh and blood adversaries while in full gallop. Even here on the practice field, advancing on a cadre of straw-filled opponents, they were an impressive bunch — tall, muscled, each one with a finely chiseled physiognomy. Candidates for the Sultan’s School for Pages in Topkapi Palace were carefully screened for the slightest imperfection. Suleiman took seriously the Koranic precept that outer beauty was what Allah bestowed on inner virtue.

  On command, the players rushed forward in a row, weapons poised. When the Master of the Gerit deemed that they had reached the ideal range, he shot a volley with a pistol and in tandem they hurled their weapons at the dummies facing them with all the force they could muster. A veritable rain of gerits poured down on the dummy targets. Each tip was stained with a different color of dye to mark precisely which part of his target the marksman hit. Points were allotted by the Master: five for the heart, four for the skull, and so on. Then the whole drill began again. Almost never did a hurler fail to hit the target altogether. These were, after all, members of the Sultan’s own gerit team.

  Narcissus managed to edge quite close to the practice field without attracting notice. And when the Master of the Gerit called for a water break, the eunuch quite naturally approached the blond page, del Medigo, with an offering of spring water he had poured from a spigot for the purpose. (A fresh supply of spring water was brought down from Mount Ulu to the practice field every afternoon. Nothing was too good for the members of the Sultan’s gerit team.)

  The eunuch’s task was well begun. Contact had been made. Now he could allow himself the indulgence of enjoying the pleasures of the scene, not least the balletic grace of the hurlers. But when the practice ended, he was once again all business. Edging forward as the team of beautiful young men trooped off the field to wash up in the hamam, Narcissus placed himself unobtrusively but visibly close to the edge of the path, the very spot where Danilo del Medigo stopped to investigate a stone in his boot. As the blond page took off the boot and shook it, a roll of papyrus was thrust into his hands and stripped from his hands into his boot in a single fluid motion. Not a word was exchanged.

  Moments later, in the hamam, Danilo del Medigo was trading jokes with his teammates while they were being pummeled by the masseur and scrubbed and scraped in hot water and cold by the scalpers, those experts with the sharpened mussel shell from which no vagrant hair escaped. He even stayed behind to have his nails pared since he was in no hurry. He had already made apologies for not accompanying his teammates on their quasi-illegal outing beyond the walls that evening. Were it not for his proven prowess with the gerit, young del Medigo’s reluctance to carouse with his teammates on their free days might well have subjected him to a brutal hazing. But the boy was, after all, the youngest member of the team, and his fellow pages made allowances for his reluctance, assuring each other that next year he would be out drinking and whoring with them like a man. For now, all he had to suffer was a little mild teasing before they bundled themselves off to the fleshpots of Galata via the Eunuch’s Path and left him free to investigate the contents of his boot.

  Inside he found a single sheet of paper that looked as if it had been torn out of a book. When he broke the wax seal that held it together, out tumbled a fresh red rosebud anchored in a single stick of cinnamon. He smiled broadly and tucked the little tokens into his girdle, then turned his attention to the paper in which they were wrapped.

  Unfolded, it revealed a sketchy landscape in red chalk featuring a black caique of the sort that plied the waters of the Bosphorus. The sleek craft was tethered to a small dock. The sky above was empty except for a perfect half-moon hanging low in the west sky, which cast a shower of moon rays onto a small banner flying from the prow of the caique emblazoned with a single word: Tonight. The message that Narcissus was sent to deliver had been deciphered and perfectly understood.

  9

  FORTUNE FAVORS

  THE BOLD

  In the staging area at Üsküdar, the advance units of Suleiman’s returning army were preparing the city of tents that was erected wherever he spent the night on campaign, be it for a month, a week, or a day. Fully assembled, his private quarters in the field became a replica of his selamlik at Topkapi Palace. There was a sleeping tent, a bathing tent, an audience tent, a wardrobe tent, a cooking tent, his doctor’s tent, and the vast portable shed that enclosed his treasury. When the Sultan traveled, all the gold he owned traveled with him.

  On campaign, his governing council, the divan, had continued to meet four times a week as it did at Topkapi, assembling in a huge meeting tent capacious enough to accommodate its entire membership — viziers, judges, and men of religion, the Ulema. The sleeping tents for his councillors and their attendants clustered around their portable council chamber, setting this distinguished group off from the tents that housed the hundreds of servants, clerks, and pages who together enabled the Sultan’s private quarters to function in their accustomed way as both a residence and the seat of imperial power.

  The campaign caravan also included a bazaar that was set up each time the march came to a halt — stall after stall of merchants and tailors and shoemakers and blacksmiths and their camp followers, all of whom had to be te
nted and fed. Plus the many portable mosques required to accommodate the spiritual needs of this vast population, together with their attendants. And we have not yet begun to consider the actual fighting force — the Ottoman army proper — with all of its branches and auxiliaries. No wonder that, fully mustered, Suleiman’s army on the march numbered upwards of three hundred thousand souls. And animals too numerous to count.

  This, then, was the small city that was assembling on the banks of the Bosphorus the eve of October 23, for a single night only.

  Why bother to unpack and repack this vast encampment for only one night? Why not disperse the various units into the city once they reached the Bosphorus and save time, trouble, and expense? Because Suleiman the Magnificent was no mere general or head of state returning home from the wars. He was also the King of Kings, the Unique Arbiter of the World’s Destinies, Padishah, Sovereign of East and West, Master of Two Continents and Three Seas, Caliph of the World, Defender of Islam, the Shadow of God on Earth, and on a less-exalted plane absolute ruler of the largest empire the world had ever seen. Such a man must enter his capital like a god descending from heaven.

  By sunset, when the Sultan and his entourage galloped into Üsküdar, the waters of the Bosphorus were already churned up from the barges bearing all the paraphernalia needed for the next day’s victory parade — huge boxes of banners and shiny medallions, trunks full of saddles and bridles, complete sets of polished musical instruments already tuned, hundreds of parade horses to replace the dusty cavalry of war. Even now, a fresh crop of equestrian mounts was waiting to be caparisoned in their gold-edged, gem-studded parade blankets. One entire barge had already crossed the Bosphorus loaded with barrels of scented rose petals to be scattered from the rooftops, Roman style. Overnight the ragged, battle-scarred force that had arrived from Austria would be transformed into a fantasy cortege out of Caesar’s Gallic wars.