The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Amid this furious activity, the Sultan was quietly enjoying a hot bath before he retired for the night behind his gold-embroidered tent flap. The rigors of tomorrow’s long, slow ride through the streets of his capital demanded that he be well-rested.

  Meanwhile, across the water in the city, the air resounded with the clatter of hammers and the grunts and groans of workmen. A thousand torches lit their labors. With only a night and a morning to prepare, the palace Janissaries were already climbing poles all over town to string up victory banners. Palace launderers had been pulled from their tubs, guards from their gates, and armorers from their forges to construct kiosks on stilts at every main intersection. From these platforms, an avalanche of coins and sweetmeats would rain down on tomorrow’s crowds.

  At the hippodrome, a hundred palace gardeners, who normally practice their carpentry skills constructing delicate trellises and airy pergolas, were throwing together row upon row of temporary stands for the games and circuses that would enliven the week-long celebration. And this entire makeshift workforce would stay at their task throughout the night if necessary to transform the capital into a Roman carnival. The Ottomans were experienced looters. They had appropriated their poetry from the Persians and their protocol from the Byzantines. To master the art of celebrating great occasions, they sought mentors even farther afield and studied the world’s greatest crowd-pleasers, the Romans, who taught them that bread and circuses went a long way toward filling empty stomachs and empty purses that had been drained by war.

  In contrast with the city streets, life behind the walls of Topkapi Palace remained untouched by this tumult. In the First and Second Courts tranquility prevailed. And in the Third Court total silence reigned as always. Not yet back in residence, the Padishah was already enforcing his will from the staging area across the water.

  Suleiman valued silence. He was the sultan who introduced the teaching of sign language to his servants so as to limit the number of words they would need to utter aloud. Whoever walked in his selamlik walked shoeless. The tap of heels on the cobblestones irritated the Padishah. Even the corps who guarded this most private domain walked their patrols barefoot. They knew by sight every one of the Sultan’s attendants and every soul who had regular business in the Third Court. And God help anyone who wandered into these precincts accidentally.

  Of course, Danilo del Medigo ran no such risk as he made his way from his dormitory in the School for Pages to the Doctor’s House. His father, Judah del Medigo, was one of the small number of attendants the Sultan held close. On the first day of his service as Suleiman’s Chief Body Physician, the doctor was given this house in the Third Court of Topkapi Palace to use as both his residence and his pharmacy. (Perhaps “loaned” would be a better word than “given,” since any gift from the Sultan to a retainer or slave was presumed ultimately to belong to the Sultanate and must be returned on the death of the recipient.) But as long as Judah continued to be the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician, the Doctor’s House remained his son’s home.

  He still returned to his father’s house every Friday — by special permission from the Sultan — to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. This dispensation had no precedent. But the Sultan valued his Jewish physician highly and, being a devout Muslim, understood the value a father places on his son’s religious education.

  What made the arrangement most convenient was that, since the Sultan’s school was conceived from its beginnings as a training ground for the elite few who might be expected to enter his service, it was built across the court from the Sultan’s selamlik. This proximity made it easy for Danilo del Medigo to live up to the obligation imposed by his father — with the Sultan’s assent — to leave the School for Pages at dusk each Friday and prepare himself for Sabbath services. Even when the doctor was off campaigning with the Sultan, the son was still excused to attend Shabbat services in a synagogue outside the walls every Friday evening and Saturday.

  After three years of this singular arrangement, the novelty having long worn off, the sight of the fair Jewish page trudging back and forth from his dormitory in the School for Pages to his father’s house raised no questions in the wheeled guardhouse that moved constantly back and forth between the Gate of Felicity and the rear wall of the palace. But should the boy venture beyond his accustomed route, he would fall under as much suspicion as any other errant page.

  So it was that when Danilo made his way at sundown from his dormitory to his father’s house as usual, he navigated among the grazing gazelles and the sundials and the pretty fountains as nonchalantly as any practiced Argonaut. But later that night, when he emerged into the darkness through the rear door of his father’s house with a stout rope looped over his shoulder, he crept along under the eaves warily, like a miscreant.

  Phoebe, the moon goddess, had provided him with half a moon’s worth of illumination filtered by a mantel of fluffy clouds, just as it appeared in the sketch still folded in his boot. The rear wall of the palace was a short dash from the back of the Doctor’s House. For a champion hurler like Danilo, it took only one toss of the looped rope to anchor it on a spike protruding from the top of the wall. Agile as a monkey, he scaled the stone face of the wall and jumped down on the other side, trailing the rope behind him. He then curled the rope up neatly and secreted it in the stump of the ancient pear tree behind the rickety ladder casually balanced against the trunk. From here it was but a few feet to the Eunuch’s Path and freedom.

  But tonight Danilo del Medigo was not bound for the forbidden pleasures of Galata. Instead, he crossed over the Eunuch’s Path and headed downhill through the sloping thicket toward a small dock below, picking his way delicately between openings in the underbrush, invisible in the darkness but familiar to him from many previous rambles.

  The descent was not long, but it was steep and somewhat perilous. When this palace was built by Mehmet the Conqueror, he not only had the peak leveled but also its entire surround pitted with potholes and barbed wire to repel invaders. Since then no one had summoned up the nerve to sail through the Dardanelles and lay siege to old Constantinople. Nowadays, the sea side of Palace Point was a quiet cove most notable for the little pier at the foot of the slope commonly known as the Grand Vizier’s dock (although its true purpose was to serve as anchorage for the Sultan’s personal fleet of caiques). This jetty also functioned as the ideal embarkation point for Suleiman’s not-infrequent, incognito jaunts into the bazaars and inns of the Galata district and for his discreet moonlit outings on the Bosphorus.

  Given the extremely private use to which the little dock was put, it need hardly be said that anyone foolish or careless enough to be caught in these environs at night could count on finding himself at the bottom of the Bosphorus by morning. But the lure of the forbidden — the risk — was indeed the very thing that had enticed Danilo as a young boy to sneak out over the wall after his father was asleep, and make his way to a narrow rock shelf overlooking the jetty, where he spent many moonlit hours gazing down at caiques and skiffs and lighters slicing through the rippling waters of the Marmara Sea toward the Mediterranean and Italy. It was the most peaceful spot in the boy’s world, as well as the most perilous. Nestled in the rocks among the rest of the flotsam and jetsam he felt strangely at home. And in the early years of his life in Topkapi, it was the place where, splayed out on the ledge gazing westward, he allowed himself to dream of the day he would see his homeland again.

  But Danilo had long since given up yearning for the past, and as befits a healthy boy on the cusp of manhood, he was fully engaged in enjoying whatever pleasures Fortuna chose to bestow on him in the here and now. At the same time, tonight’s escapade was a kind of extension of those boyhood junkets, although the game was now much more complex and the penalty for discovery even greater than what might have been meted out to a boy who simply wandered inadvertently into the Sultan’s private preserve.

  Tonight he crawled down the side of the hill with the ass
urance of one who had long since mastered the terrain, making certain not to create a sound. It was slow going, but he arrived unscathed and unobserved at the familiar rock shelf. From this vantage point overlooking the confluence of the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea, he could safely observe the Grand Vizier’s dock without being seen by any caique that might be coming or going on the Sultan’s business.

  The scene below bore an unmistakable resemblance to the chalk drawing tucked in his boot, up to and including the sleek craft that soon heaved into view. It was rather small as caiques go, powered by only four oarsmen but marked indelibly as a part of the Sultan’s fleet by his tugra — the calligraphic emblem that graced all his possessions — imprinted on the prow.

  Once the caique entered the cove, Danilo covered the distance to the jetty in a series of hurdles and clambers aboard the craft, not waiting to be handed in. Without causing so much as a ripple, the caique shot out into the open waters of the harbor. Directly ahead lay the entrance to the Golden Horn. The oarsmen steered clear of it, thrusting the nose of the craft into the rougher waters of the Sea of Marmara. Seated with his back to the oarsmen — the less they saw, the less they would remember — Danilo watched the minarets and rainbow domes of Istanbul soften and fade into the blue-black night.

  Just then, as if to signify her approval of the venture, the moon goddess parted the clouds to reveal the fringe of silver sand that circled the Marmara seacoast. The boy took a moment to thank the goddess for her favor. Then he leaned back, drew a deep breath of the briny air, and for the first time that day allowed himself to anticipate what lay in wait for him on the little island of Kinali.

  He had not long to dream. The Sultan’s oarsmen were the strongest and quickest in the Ottoman navy. They kept the narrow craft cutting through the waves at a stiff pace, and in what seemed like no time they were lifting their paddles out of the water to manoeuver their way to the shore. No jetty here. These days, the island of Kinali was long abandoned, too unimportant to rate even a small dock. It was assumed that no one had bothered to come here since the days when the Byzantines used the Princes’ Islands as places of exile for their most troublesome family members.

  Wordlessly, Narcissus held out a hand to assist his passenger ashore. The caique pushed off, and for a short moment the blond head could be seen bobbing up and down on the beach. Then it disappeared into the woods.

  Danilo had not far to go. Kinali was small, one of the lesser of the Princes’ Islands. But the pathway through the woods was overgrown and his progress was slow. In Byzantine times each of the smaller islands had its monastery and its purpose. When a new emperor succeeded to the throne, he customarily banished to these little islets the patriarchs and princes who might conceivably threaten his hold on imperial power. There they were committed to the care of various monasteries — after they had been sapped of their will to escape by being blinded or otherwise mutilated.

  Danilo knew these stories, but tonight, as he made his way through the dense little woods, his thoughts were far from the excesses of the Greek Orthodox Christians. Damn thistles, he cursed under his breath. It had been so long since the last time that he had forgotten to wear gloves. Every time he set foot on this path, the thicket got thicker and the thorns got sharper. Pretty soon he would have to bring an axe.

  He lifted his hand to lick the blood off his fingers. Then, placing them against his teeth, he broke the silence with a piercing whistle.

  His whistle elicited a human response. “Is that my prince come to rescue me?”

  The sirens calling out to Odysseus must have sounded like this. But Danilo del Medigo was no war-weary veteran pining for a distant wife. He had yet to face his Troy. For him, the risk only enhanced the appeal of the venture.

  A thick leafy branch barred his way. He stepped back to get some purchase on the slippery forest floor, took two quick steps, and aimed a high kick at the offending barrier. It broke off at the crotch, creating a gap in the greenery and revealing a grassy circle open to the air and the moonlight. In the center of this glade, looking as if it had been painted there, stood a ruined mosque, roofless but with its walls intact, a forlorn relic protected only by a rusted portal that could barely support its half-hinged gate.

  “Tell me this, Sir Knight” — he still could not see her, but just as the poet tells it, each of her words was a purling note like honey — “how will you reach me, locked away as I am behind an iron gate?”

  He stepped up to the gate. “I have the password, lady. Audentes fortuna juvat.” Pliny’s final words before the poet leapt into the fiery furnace of Vesuvius. Fortune favors the bold.

  “Fortune favors the bold,” Danilo repeated with a rhetorical flourish as he bound into the grassy circle.

  10

  TWO WOMEN

  In 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror sailed up the Dardanelles and captured the fabled city known to the Greeks as Byzantium, to the Romans as Constantinople, and to the Turks as Istanbul. It was a city soaked in history, suspended in a mist of Roman law, Greek literature, and Christian theology — an inspired choice for an upstart whose ancestor had burst forth from Central Asia less than a century earlier, unknown and unheralded, and who was now in need of a well-positioned capital for his emerging empire.

  With full command of the Bosphorus, that great waterway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the old fort Constantinople offered immense scope for the European–Asian commerce that was already the life-blood of the new Ottoman Empire. The peak, Palace Point, also possessed the natural topography of a citadel, surrounded as it was by the waters of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles, which combined to form a huge natural moat.

  Did Mehmet, a poet as well as a warrior, hear the echo of the Persian military airs that the Ottomans had adopted for their own as he wound his way up to the old Roman acropolis at the summit? Was this the moment he decided to build a new royal palace for himself at the apex of the summit? Did he perhaps foresee a future procession with banners waving and an adoring populace on their knees all along the rocky route honoring a new king of the world — if not himself, then one of his successors? Did this vision of empire come to him as he stood on the acropolis, flanked by his own tugra fluttering in the breeze at his right hand and the Prophet’s banner at his left?

  Mehmet was a visionary. He must have sensed the potential power of those twin standards: a military force equal to that of ancient Rome driven on by a deep faith in the holy purpose of the jihad.

  Mehmet the Conqueror did not live to see such a procession. Nor did his son, nor his son’s son. But less than one hundred years after he captured Constantinople, his great-grandson, Suleiman, had already taken part more than once in just such a procession, filling not only the streets of Constantinople but the roofs and windows, as well, with adoring subjects shouting, “Al Hamdulillah, the blessing of God upon thee, O Ghazi!”

  Last year, Suleiman had returned victorious from Hungary. This year, he returned victorious from Austria. Looking down from his perch in paradise, where all great ghazi warriors go when they die, Mehmet must have taken great pride in the fruit of his loins whose accomplishments already rivaled his own.

  Although the Sultan’s victory procession was not scheduled to begin until afternoon, the crowds were already beginning to gather in the early-morning sun. It was a remarkably well-behaved assemblage — the Ottomans were the world’s experts at crowd control — a buzzing swarm that separated like the Red Sea for the Sultan’s golden coach as it made its way from the harem in the old palace to Topkapi Palace.

  The coach had moved slowly but steadily though the seething mass of worshipful humanity that thronged the streets. However, when it began the ascent to Palace Point, the two women inside found themselves buffeted from side to side as if by a turbulent sea. Not for nothing was this road known as the Path That Made the Camel Scream. The women took it in good spirit. The younger of
the two, Princess Saida, although somewhat fatigued, always welcomed an opportunity to escape her grandmother’s perfumed cloister. Beside her, Lady Hürrem, the Sultan’s Second Kadin, inhaled the excitement of the crowd like a heady perfume.

  “Thrilling, isn’t it?” she inquired.

  The young woman agreed. The hero of the day was her father. Never before had she felt so close to him. Or so distant.

  “I am pleased to have brought you along, Saida,” said the Second Kadin. “It is not right for a young girl to be locked up in the harem, especially not a royal princess. How long is it since you’ve been outside the gates of the Old Palace?”

  The girl considered before she answered. In that shark pool of envy and ambition that was the harem, a motherless girl learned early to watch her tongue.

  “I believe it was two years ago that my grandmother took me with her to a celebration at the hippodrome,” Saida answered after a pause. “When my brothers were circumcised.”

  “And before that?”

  “I remember some picnics on an island in the Sea of Marmara — I believe it is called Kinali — when I was a little girl.”

  “Well,” said Hürrem, “you are not a little girl anymore. You are a woman, Saida, a princess of the royal blood. You must begin to get used to the world you will live in when you marry.”

  The girl stiffened. “Marry?”

  “Of course, marry,” Hürrem continued, heedless of the girl’s discomfort. “Don’t tell me you have never thought of it. Every young girl thinks of marriage. Why are you shaking? Does the thought of marriage disturb you?”