Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950
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This was only a temporary remedy, however, and it did nothing to reconcile the Albanians to Ottoman rule. Many of them were Muslims, but their shared religion could not override the contempt they now felt for the Turks. “The Albanians do not any longer recognize the authority of the Grand Seigneur,” wrote an observer a few years later, “nor by extension that of the pasha of Salonica whom they regard as an odious enemy.”22 In 1793 the pasha of Shkodra defeated an Ottoman army, captured several senior officers, and sent them back with their beards shaved to show his disdain for the sultan. And in Salonica itself, they were soon causing trouble again. When the pasha attempted to arrest a known troublemaker called Alizotoglou in 1793, his house turned out to contain more than 150 of them, amply supplied with food and arms. The pasha, having called on “all true Muslims” to come to his aid, used cannons to fire on Alizotoglou’s house, but his opponent only left the city after taking hostages for his security, and threatening defiantly to return with 2000 men if an official pardon was not forthcoming. A decade later, yet another edict had to be issued ordering local officials to clear the city of “an unknown number of Albanians and others belonging to the same category who are not fulfilling any service, without any proper occupation and who are gathering incongruously.”23
And, just as the French consul had predicted, much more powerful Albanian leaders did indeed become a genuine threat to the empire. At the start of the nineteenth century Mehmed Ali, an Albanian soldier from Cavalla, became ruler of Egypt, founder of a royal dynasty, and creator of a short-lived empire in Africa and the Arab lands. Closer to home there was Ali Pasha—the “Muslim Bonaparte” as Byron called him—who ruled the entire west coast of the Balkans from his Jannina stronghold. His writ ran almost to the gates of Salonica and nearby monasteries found he provided more effective protection against brigands than the city’s governor himself, supplying them with small handwritten notes written in “extremely bad Greek” on “a small square piece of very dirty paper,” which threatened any Turk who maltreated the monks with execution. Here was an Albanian pasha building his own state and offering protection for the region’s Christians whose safety the sultan could no longer guarantee. There could be no clearer illustration of how fragile the authority of the Ottoman state had become.24
PRISONERS AND SLAVES
THE INCESSANT STRUGGLES waged between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the Habsburgs, Russians and Persians, left their mark on the city in other ways. In August 1715, after the Venetians had been driven out of the Peloponnese, six thousand Ottoman troops “dispersed into the regions of Larissa and Salonica, causing much harm along the road to the inhabitants of the country.” The head of the city’s janissary corps was told to scour the area for “evil-doers” and to imprison any he found. When more than one hundred Venetian deserters were rumoured to be making their way there, the town governor was so alarmed at the potential for disorder that he arranged for them to be seized and sold back to their commanding officers. Every campaign brought problems of this kind. In September 1769—during the war with the Russians—it was reported that “the countryside was filled with deserters, ragged, killing.”25
For war also meant booty, prisoners and slaves. As Busbecq noted in the sixteenth century, “slaves constitute the main source of gain to the Turkish soldier.” Edward Browne, the travelling son of Sir Thomas Browne (author of the Religio Medici), was moved “by the pitiful spectacle of Captives and Slaves” when he passed through northern Greece in 1668, men like the polyglot Hungarian Sigismund, a learned man who spoke “Hungarian, Sclavonian, Turkish, Armenian and Latin” and had served a Turk, a Jew and an Armenian before being manumitted. French and Venetian consuls tried to get imprisoned or enslaved prisoners of war released and helped others escape: in 1700 the consulate gave a list to Paris of “all the soldier deserters, French, Italians, Spaniards etc., Catholics, Huguenots and infidels” he had sent on to Marseilles. The Alsace man redeemed by another French consul in 1792, or the deserter who fled his master and made his way to Cavalla, were among the dozens of fortunate individuals who were thus returned to Christendom many years after failed campaigns had first brought them to the Ottoman lands.26
The fog of war enshrouded this human traffic in a penumbra of legal uncertainty. Two Hungarians sold in the Larissa market in 1721 had to be released on the emperor’s orders after it turned out that they were not captured in battle but had merely been seized by some enterprising janissaries while about their master’s business. In fact, peace treaties often stipulated that prisoners of war were not to be sold. “I learned ten days ago that in Larissa there are two Venetians, prisoners of some Albanians, who are negotiating their sale,” writes the Venetian consul in 1739. “I immediately sent a trustworthy man there to the kadi with a letter informing him that they are Venetians and that according to the terms of the peace they cannot be sold as slaves. The kadi read the letter, imprisoned the Albanians and gave up the two men into my care.”
But because so many of the sultan’s troops saw the acquisition of slaves as their right, official orders were often ignored and the problem of illegal enslavement persisted, complicating efforts by the Ottoman state to organize prisoner exchanges. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, with a large number of Ottoman troops in Russian captivity, the sultan ruled that all Russian prisoners still in Ottoman hands should be released. Only those “Muslims willingly staying in Russia and embracing Christianity” and “those Christians willingly embracing Islam in My supreme empire” were to be exempt. One year on, however, few of the “Russians, Poles, Moldavians, Vlachs and Moreotes” in Turkish hands had been liberated. The sultan accused Turks and Jews in Salonica of holding on to their captives out of sheer greed, and warned them that until they handed them back, the religious obligation to free “brothers of the faith” in Russian hands remained unfulfilled. As in so many areas of eighteenth-century life, what the sultan ordered and what actually happened were two quite different things.27
The traffic in bodies formed part of the Mediterranean economy until late into the nineteenth century. During the long and complex struggle between Muslim and Catholic powers all sides bought and sold slaves, and the markets of the Barbary coast had their counterparts in the little-studied dealers of Christendom. Salonica’s own inhabitants had been sold into slavery after 1430, but as the Ottoman city grew and flourished, its new residents—Christians, Jews and Muslims—all bought slaves for domestic use, many of whom settled there in their turn. Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Circassia, the Sudan and north Africa were the main sources of supply, and slaves from all these regions were to be found there. We do not know where its slave market was located but wars kept it well stocked. Large numbers of Christian women and children were sold off in 1715, after the Venetian campaign, and again in 1737 after the Habsburg invasion.28
This was not, as in the Americas, a cheap route to the plantation economy, but rather a feature of the domestic household life of the well-to-do in an empire where slaves had until very recently occupied some of the highest positions in the state. In Salonica, slaves cost far more than domestic servants, especially if the latter were children; there is no evidence for their being used as cheap labour en masse in public works in the way that occurred in north Africa. Some accumulated money of their own, enabling them to buy their way out of service. Others were freed with a legacy on their master’s death. Probably worst off were those who had fled their employer’s service, or were released from the galleys with no money to support them: such individuals eked out a very precarious existence on the margins of society, joining the beggars, gypsies and wandering dervishes at one of the city’s half a dozen soup kitchens. Groups of African beggars roamed around the city and its hinterland, and these were almost certainly manumitted slaves, banding together for protection. Those on their own, in particular women, were frequently kidnapped to be sold as slaves by dealers. This happened, for instance, to Amina bint Abdullah, a convert from Christianity, despite the fact that �
�she did not have anything to do with slavery in her genealogy.”29
What worried non-Muslims was not so much the idea of slavery itself—for this they were familiar with—as the prospect that enslavement might lead to conversion and the loss of Christian (or Jewish) souls. “Various Turks have come here,” reports the Venetian consul in June 1770, following unsuccessful Greek uprisings in the islands and on the mainland, “with twenty of those children, male and female, and they sell them to other Turks, who make little Turks [tourkakia] of them.” The Jesuits and Jews had organizations devoted to redeeming slaves who were of their faith. Other Christians handled matters more informally. In the 1720s, for instance, a female Ukrainian slave who had been badly treated by her captors was brought to Salonica to be sold. She had some hidden savings and sought help in arranging a ransom, or at least a Christian buyer, “so that she does not fall into the hands of a Turk.” Because the woman belonged to the Orthodox rite, some of the town’s European merchants questioned whether, being Catholics, they should be involved and proposed that “Mikalis, the Greek physician,” should take responsibility, especially since he knew that “she can sew and embroider excellently and weave and can cook in the Turkish style very well.” But Mikalis did not want to pay the asking price, and anyway the Greeks had a reputation for being more reluctant than the Turks to manumit their slaves, “especially when the slaves are Polish or Kazak or of any different nation.” The Catholic Father Superior found a solution by organizing a lottery among the French merchants in the city: within three days he had raised the money and arranged for the woman to be bought and given to the winner. The sale was completed and the necessary deed of sale was signed by the local customs officer, handed over with the woman herself. She was lodged in a French-owned house “until she learns the catechism and other mysteries of the Christian confession, which the priest promised to teach her in Turkish, because [she] speaks only Turkish and Russian.” She had not been freed, but her soul at least was safe.30
Captives of a different kind, fewer in number but equally reliable indicators of far-off troubles, were the distinguished guests whom the authorities in Istanbul sent to Salonica as political exiles. The city provided a suitable home where they could live in some style, hunt if they wished and hold court at official expense, remaining all the while under the watchful eye of the authorities. At a time when many were living on the margins, they were treated extremely well. We still have the list of foods provided for Mirza Safi, a Persian pretender, when he was held there in 1731. It includes “bread, rice, clarified butter, yoghurt, cumin, sugar, starch, boiled grape-juice, clove, cinnamon, chicken, eggs, almonds, pistachios, pepper, saffron, coffee, coriander, olive oil, flour, honey, bees-wax, grapes, salt, chick peas, vinegar, onions, lemon-juice, black cumin, chestnuts, quinces, tobacco (from Shiraz), soap, meat, barley, straw and vegetables”—a respectable diet by any standards.31
Patriarchs and grand viziers were parked there when their careers suffered eclipse. Sultan Abdul Hamid II himself was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 and sent into gilded captivity. Hungarian aristocrats passed through, as did the Pole Jan Potocki, the multi-talented author of that remarkable novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, who blew his brains out with a silver bullet a few years later. Following the suppression of the Wahhabi uprising in 1814, the Sherif of Mecca arrived with an entourage of forty and was treated with the greatest honour: he lasted a few years before succumbing to the plague. His son and successor, Abdul Muttalib—“a grand old man of sixty, tall, but slender, with the grand manner, distinguished in every way, of very brown colour, almost black, fine skin, a long blue robe, a Kashmir turban”—eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and even erected a domed tomb in his father’s memory which survived into the early twentieth century.32
Among all these, however, the man who stayed the longest and left the most important record of his experiences was a little-known earlyeighteenth-century Ukrainian political emigré called Pylyp Orlyk. After years fighting against the Muscovite tsars, Orlyk fled first to Sweden, and then passed through central Europe to the relative safety of the Ottoman lands. On 2 November 1722—in the month of Moharrem 1135 according to the dating of the imperial firman—the fifty-year-old Orlyk was ordered by the Porte to Salonica. There this cultivated and warm-hearted man spent no less than twelve years in exile, watching the twists and turns of European politics from the sidelines while his impoverished wife remained in Cracow and his eight children were dispersed throughout Europe. Only in March 1734 was he released, thanks to French intervention, and allowed to move north; still trying to organize an uprising in the Ukraine, he died in poverty nine years later.33
Orlyk’s misfortune has proved to be the historian’s gain, for from the day of his arrival he kept a diary which offers a unique insight into the eighteenth-century city. No other journal of comparable detail from Salonica has survived. His urgent scrawl gives access not merely to his voluminous political correspondence, most of which—in Latin, French, Polish and Ukrainian—was duly copied into his journals, but also to the rigours of daily life in his place of exile. The misbehaviour of his loutish servants, the local fare, his bag after a day’s shooting in the plains, stories told him by tailors, interpreters and bodyguards enliven its pages. Jesuits, consuls, doctors, spies and the Turkish judges and governors who ran the city all encountered the busy exile.
Much of the time, he lived well, considering his predicament. He hunted partridge, hogs and hares, which he distributed generously among his acquaintances. There was a lot of drinking, especially among the Christians—the French wandered drunkenly through the streets of the European quarter during Carnival, while parties at the house of the Greek metropolitan apparently went on for days at a time, with chicken, salted olives and lemon jam washed down with copious quantities of vodka, wine and coffee. Orlyk and his entourage were fond of the bottle too and he coped easily enough with his often inebriated Jewish interpreter and his manservant “Red,” found more than once sprawled in the gutter after a hard night. But the dangers and risks of urban life hemmed him in. At the minor end of the scale they included frequent indigestion from over-eating, the “horrid muck” of the city streets and the bribery necessary to smooth relations with Greek and Ottoman officials alike. He was shocked by the corruption of the church and the readiness of Christians to use the Ottoman courts when it served their interests. His diary is also sensitive to disturbing portents—a full moon cleft with deep black fissures, earth tremors and “great lights flying in the air like a big lance.” Meanwhile, crimes went unpunished, pirates threatened voyagers by sea, and as the streets echoed with the sounds of gunfire, janissaries and irregulars acted much as they wished. Of all the numerous dangers Orlyk’s diary describes, however, none was more frightening, murderous or unpredictable than what an earlier traveller described as “the terrour of horrid Plagues.” Arriving in the city in the aftermath of the epidemic of 1718–1719, Orlyk quickly became familiar with the biggest killer of the early modern Ottoman world.34
PLAGUE
“THANK GOD THE PLAGUE IS NOT HERE!” wrote a relieved traveller arriving in Salonica in 1788. Borne on the trade routes from Central Asia and the Black Sea through to the Mediterranean, it could come by both land and sea. A century before Orlyk, an epidemic in Istanbul had killed one thousand a day, according to the British ambassador there, and forced more than two hundred thousand to flee into the countryside. Izmir lost perhaps one-fifth of its entire population in 1739–41, and as many as a quarter may have died between 1758 and 1762: the historian Daniel Panzac estimates it lost the equivalent of its entire population to the plague in the course of the century. At such times, one saw “the Streets … filled with infected bodies as well alive as dead; the living seeking remedies either from the Phisitians or at the Bathes, the Dead lying in open Beers, or else quite naked at theyr dores to be washd before theyr buryalls.”35
In Salonica, athwart the empire’s main carrying routes, warm summers
and a humid climate offered the plague bacillus a near-ideal environment in the lethal months from April to July. Compared with Izmir, with 55 plague years in the eighteenth century, and Istanbul (65), Salonica got off lightly: even so plague struck one year in three. Outbreaks in 1679–80, 1687–89, 1697–99, 1708–9, 1712–13—which supposedly claimed 6,000 victims—1718–19, 1724 and 1729–30 were just the start. In 1740, a “bad plague” carried off 1337 Christians, 2239 Turks and 3935 Jews. That was not the only really serious outbreak: in 1762 10–12,000 people, roughly 16–20% of the population, died. The figures were similar in 1781 when as a survivor put it, one could “die of fright,” and again in 1814. Over the century, roughly 55–65,000 victims were carried off, something close to the mid-century population of the city itself. Only the constant inflow of new, mostly Christian, migrants from the countryside and high, mostly Jewish, local birth rates can account for the lack of a very steep decline in numbers. It is testimony to the resilience of the city’s economy that unlike ports such as Alexandria and Aleppo, its growth was not more seriously checked.36
Through Orlyk’s entries during the epidemic of 1724—a serious year but not nearly as bad as 1713 or 1762—we can see the astonishingly rapid trajectory from rumour to full-scale panic and mass death. It all started fairly quietly: “On Wednesday morning, after I came back from the Orthodox Church after mass, I was told by my people that the small daughter of a man who lives close by the cemetery at the Orthodox Church is extremely sick with the plague.” Hearing this, Greeks from the vicinity had already started moving out to villages in the mountains. And there were omens: “My people told me they heard an owl on my inn, and this is a fatal bird, which is proven by experience.”37
The next day the girl was dead and the church had closed. Orlyk asked his servant to find lodgings for him in a nearby village, together with the English consul and some other members of the community, in order to escape “God’s awful punishment.” But the villagers, as often happened, were understandably reluctant to take in refugees from the city and started arming and erecting barricades to prevent them coming. Reportedly they were being encouraged by the pasha of Salonica, who planned to make wealthy foreigners pay handsomely for the privilege of leaving.38