by Mark Mazower
Over the next few days, the sultan held public audiences in the Beshchinar gardens by the shore. Under the plane trees he received the homage of local Ottoman dignitaries, the chief rabbi and the metropolitan, while hundreds of petitions were handed to him by townspeople and villagers seeking his aid in curbing brigandage, eradicating corruption and guaranteeing just administration. His aides distributed more than sixty thousand piastres for the benefit of local Ottoman, Greek and Jewish schools, hospitals and the poor “of different nations.” By night, the town was brilliantly illuminated as lanterns festooned the minarets and ships. When he departed three days later, he took with him not only the cheering memory of his enthusiastic reception but also an attack of the local fever, brought on by exposure to Salonica’s notoriously unhealthy summer climate (and—so it was whispered among observers—“to his imbibing other things besides bad air when sitting there” for he was known for his fondness for alcohol). Two years later, he was dead, not yet forty years of age.1
This was the only royal visit paid to Salonica, the empire’s most important and prosperous European city, during the whole of the nineteenth century, and probably the first such since Mehmed IV wintered there in 1669. But then Abdul Mecid was not a man overly concerned with convention: he had shocked people a few years earlier by attending the wedding of the daughter of one of the leading Christians at his court, and had even graced with his presence a ball held by the British ambassador. Twenty years earlier, his Gulhané (Rose Garden) decree had ushered in far-reaching changes to the way his empire was ruled, and in 1856, following the Crimean War, a second proclamation had spelled out the need for modernization and religious equality in even greater detail. Breaking the isolation which had come to surround the figure of the sultan, Abdul Mecid naturally wanted to see for himself the results of his reforms.
For the Ottoman empire was never the static and unchanging entity its critics (and idealizers) insisted it was. After the Napoleonic wars, its sultans learned an important lesson from the success of imperial rivals like Russia, the Habsburgs and Prussia: no state could hope to survive without centralizing military, judicial and fiscal authority. Mehmed Ali’s regime in post-Napoleonic Egypt had begun this process, demonstrating that an Islamic country was capable of modernizing itself along European lines. Indeed so successful was the experiment that by the 1830s Egypt had emerged as a serious threat to the empire itself.
It was in the midst of this Egyptian crisis that Abdul Mecid came to the throne and that his reforms—the “Auspicious Reorderings” (Tanzimat i-Hayriye)—had their origins. Mehmed Ali, a servant of the sultan, had been bitterly disappointed that the help he had provided against the Greek rebels had not been better rewarded, and once the Greek crisis was over, he sent his new French-trained army into the sultan’s Syrian provinces. In June 1839, just after Mahmud II’s death, the Ottoman grand admiral surrendered the entire fleet to the Egyptian upstart, and when the youthful new sultan, Abdul Mecid, offered to make Mehmed Ali hereditary governor of Egypt, the latter demanded Syria and Adana too. Faced with humiliation, the Ottoman foreign minister was sent to London to secure British backing. A joint British-Austrian and Ottoman fleet bombarded Beirut and forced the Egyptians out of Syria and in 1841 Mehmed Ali backed down, accepting hereditary rule over Egypt under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman crown.
During the crisis, the influential British ambassador in Istanbul, Stratford Canning, and reformist Ottoman diplomats had both become convinced that the only hope for the survival of the empire lay in sweeping institutional change. Mustafa Reshid, the Ottoman foreign minister, led this movement and it was in November 1839, while the delicate negotiations for British help were continuing in London, that from his residence in Bryanston Square he sketched out a draft of new legislation fundamentally altering the constitutional basis of the Ottoman state. The draft itself became the famous decree of Gulhané in which Abdul Mecid declared his intention to safeguard the security of life, honour and property of his subjects, to do away with tax-farms and state monopolies, to bring in a regular system of tax assessment and collection, and to introduce a new means of conscription into the army.2
Even though the proclamation was short on specifics, it was an astonishing departure from tradition, for in outline the Gulhané decree projected an entirely new relationship between the sultan and his subjects. His pledge that “the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall enjoy our imperial concern” marked, at least in embryo, a policy of formal equality of all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religion, a policy which would transform the very foundations of Ottoman rule. In addition, it defined relations between ruler and ruled in a completely new way: the empire’s subjects were no longer merely the sultan’s property, governed through a range of intermediaries, contracts and special concessions; they were now individuals bound politically in a direct relationship with the head of the state. Thus began the transformation of Ottoman administration, law, economy and politics which reached its apogee in the 1876 constitution and the short-lived parliament of the following year.3
Thanks to the support of the Great Powers, especially the British, the Near Eastern crisis of 1839–41 removed the Egyptian threat to the Ottoman dynasty, and Sultan Abdul Mecid could begin the difficult task of realizing the promises he had made. Imperial ministries were established and expanded, and the new civil service became the generator of change. An invigorated central government started to re-assert its power over the provinces. The tax system was reformed so that collection no longer lay, at least in theory, in the hands of the provincial governors and their tax-farmers but by salaried tax collectors sent out from Istanbul. Administrative boundaries were re-drawn to clarify the chain of command. Governors were supposed to pay more attention to local advisory councils, marking the first time the principle of representative government had been acknowledged. New criminal and commercial tribunals came into existence alongside the older kadi courts. And finally, the military and civilian functions of provincial administrators were separated, and the army itself was reorganized, with new supply services and an autonomous military school system. It was, on paper, a radical transformation.
The challenge was to sell it to the populace. In April 1840, therefore, the governor of Salonica, Namik Pasha, called a meeting of leading inhabitants to explain the principles behind the new decree. The Christians appeared pleased, but the beys were annoyed by the idea that Muslims and non-Muslims might pay the same taxes. Over the coming months, it became clear that opposition to the reforms was mobilizing. On the other hand, support for them was discernible too among the peasantry, shopkeepers and guilds. By the end of 1842, the British consul was optimistically noting “a more correct system of administration in all the branches of the Local Government, less oppression, less plundering, and everyone being free, it may be said, to dispose of his own.”4
Yet in fact, it was early days and the struggle was just beginning: the central government might propose, but it was those with power in regional centres like Salonica who disposed. The destruction of the janissaries had removed one of the most unruly obstacles to the authority of the sultan, and brought relative peace to provincial society, but other interest groups and powerful classes remained. In mid-century Salonica, three centres of influence predominated—the governor, the local landed elite, and the private bankers and money-lenders who controlled the supply of credit. The success or failure of the Ottoman state’s attempt to reform itself depended on the relations between them.
THE PASHAS
IT WAS SURELY NOT BY CHANCE that Sultan Abdul Mecid did not stay in the governor’s residence on his 1859 visit. A sprawling wooden building in the centre of the town, in a walled enclosure with gardens, outbuildings and offices, it was not a particularly grand or awe-inspiring affair. Its imposing fin-de-siècle replacement—a palatial neo-classical pile designed by an Italian architect at the end of the nineteenth century—was very different, and showed how far the power and majesty of the
Ottoman state had grown. Today this building still houses the offices of the pasha’s Greek equivalent, and the car-parks, widened streets and open spaces which detach it from its surroundings signal its authority. But at the time of Abdul Mecid’s visit, the pasha’s konak was surrounded by narrow twisting streets, inns, stables, a hamam and the Saatli (Clocktower) mosque, its theological school and cemetery: it was not left in majestic isolation, and had not yet succeeded in imposing its demands on the urban space around it.
The pasha’s divan, however, was the administrative heart of the city: through the double-guard at its gates thronged all those seeking an audience. When summoned they removed their shoes and walked down carpeted corridors to a large, light reception room lined with sofas and stools. Here petitions were presented, complaints aired and information passed on, all in full hearing of the many other supplicants seated and awaiting their turn: news of everything that had been discussed at the divan spread through the coffee-houses of the town within hours. Access was surprisingly easy, and restricted neither by religion nor status. The wealthy Omer Pasha, “though as fond of pomp and show as most pashas,” nevertheless ensured that “the most humble individual may at any moment obtain an interview.” Distinguished visitors were greeted by the pasha in person, and invited to seat themselves beside him. Sweetmeats, coffee, sherbets, cigarettes and fine chibouks with amber mouth-pieces were handed round, and newcomers were engaged in polite conversation, or encouraged to report the news they brought with them. Hierarchy and informality were blended in ways unfamiliar to Western visitors: Ottoman Christian subjects displayed servility, like the elderly dragoman from the consulate, who “raised his hand to his head” each time he addressed the pasha. On the other hand, Muslims of all ranks behaved with greater ease, and village peasants spoke as freely as dignitaries visiting from the capital.5
If he was conscientious or prudent, the governor did not remain in the seclusion of his konak. Hadji Ahmed Pasha perambulated incognito, chatting with shopkeepers, and acquiring local knowledge which he put to use establishing a short-lived police force to patrol the streets. Sali Pasha personally inspected the state of the prisons, while his successor, a keen reformer, “visits every corner of the town … instead of passing his leisure in the corner of his divan,” and as a result ordered prisoners to sweep the streets and organized monthly inspections of the fire brigades. Another pasha wandered the streets disguised as a farmer, and mingled with the peasants outside the town walls, encouraging them to submit petitions to himself!6
This was still a personalized system of rule in which temperament counted for much. Husni Pasha headed off a riot by promptly announcing lower prices for flour, while Akif Pasha won praise for his “timely and vigorous measures” to check an outbreak of cholera. During a fire in 1840, Omer Pasha “was immediately on the spot” to check the flames by ordering all the shops near the fire to be pulled down. By contrast, Yusuf Pasha was “not respected owing to his indolence” and the former vizier Riza Pasha made it obvious that he felt he was parked there in exile.7 Only a year or so before him, in 1846, Yacoub Pasha had sat and watched as more than fifteen hundred houses were burned. As the British consul reported:
His Excellency Yacoub Pasha evinced the most extraordinary, if not cruel, apathy, smoking his pipe and quietly looking at the fire without giving one single para to urge the people to exert themselves. Most of the fire engines were taken away from the fire to be ready to protect the Konak of the Pasha and the Greek Archbishop’s palace, the consequence was that the fire made dreadful ravages till it reached these two extremities.
In one instance, when an Engine was required which had been taken by some Greeks to protect the church of St. Theodoro (when all danger for the safety of the edifice was passed) I urged His Excellency Yacoub Pasha to send and take the Engine to save the upper part of the Town, his reply was “What can I do, it is a Frank engine.” Astonished at such a reply, I said: “The engine may be a Frank engine but Your Excellency must not forget that you are a Governor, and that as it is necessary for the safety of the Town, you should send and seize it.” Yacoub Pasha then sent some of his people to take it, but they returned saying that it was a Frank engine and that they will not give it up.8
The mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman state, as this example may suggest, was still suffering more from chronic weakness than from excessive despotism. The pasha had no greater resources at his direct disposal than his eighteenth-century predecessors had commanded—usually only small detachments of zaptiehs, or gendarmes, who were quartered at his palace, or companies of artillerymen manning the batteries in the fort. In 1843, the departure of troops to the capital left only five hundred artillerymen to police the town and keep order throughout the pashalik. There was no regular municipal police force till late in the century, and the streets were patrolled infrequently. Night patrols and nightwatchmen were often armed with nothing more than the large stick they used to beat on the cobbles, and frequently stood aside rather than get involved in brawls which they had not been ordered to stop; many neighbourhoods effectively policed themselves, with the local headman organizing bands of young men, especially in the Jewish quarters of the lower town. As a result, the market attracted thieves and pickpockets, and there were even gangs of child-prostitutes, armed with pistols and rifles, who roamed the streets near the port, clustering around the hamams, and soliciting sailors from visiting naval vessels. The public baths themselves were, according to the experienced British consul, “full of children who act as Fellachs, or washers … the resort of all the most depraved, and where the crime is openly tolerated.” But as with abortion—another technically illegal but widely tolerated social practice—little was done to end the scandal. On one occasion, a sweep was made of the baths, and all workers there under thirty years old were dismissed; but as soon as the pasha responsible was disgraced and sent on elsewhere, they came back.9
Lack of police hampered the monitoring of known trouble spots—casinos, cabarets and cafés “where all the wicked subjects gather together to drink, play cards and gamble, and then prowl the streets.” It also made it harder to disperse the kinds of mobs that still formed when grain prices rose and rumours of scarcity spread through the lower quarters—as when one thousand poor Jews stormed grain warehouses in February 1847. Until late in the century, criminal investigation continued to be based upon the principle of collective neighbourhood punishment: thus after two women and their children were brutally killed not far from the pasha’s residence in 1839, the entire street was jailed in an effort to find the culprits. The prison itself was squalid and over-crowded, its Jewish jailers notorious for their use of the heavy three-inch collar which they fixed around an inmate’s neck. Occasionally, public executions took place without ceremony, sometimes outside the Vardar Gate, at others in the midst of the city, the rope hung from a convenient signpost, a stool borrowed from a nearby café, the dead man left hanging with a placard around his neck. Lack of statistics makes it impossible to know how often the Ottomans resorted to capital punishment, though it was almost certainly far less than the Christian states of north and western Europe. The real difficulty for the Ottoman authorities was asserting their power, not limiting it.10
The destruction of the janissary corps in 1826 eliminated the pasha’s chief challengers. But disorderly soldiers were still a problem. In 1855 troops en route to the Crimean War were abducting people for ransom, throwing stones at houses in the Greek quarter and frequenting the bath-houses in search of young boys. During the great fire of the following year, eight hundred Albanian irregulars en route to the Arab provinces plundered the bazaar freely, knowing that no one—least of all the pasha—would dare to arrest them. The year before Abdul Mecid’s visit, more irregulars swaggered around with their arms; having refused to stay in the barracks outside the walls they had to be lodged in the khans. The pasha, who did not have “more than a few artillerymen,” was powerless. Salonica’s inhabitants were always surprised when there were “no
robberies, no insults”; or when troops did nothing more than wander in great numbers through the bazaar “expressing surprise at what they see.” Badly paid and lodged in flea-ridden caravanserais or, later, in the vast, insanitary warehouse-like barracks built thoughtlessly above a former graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the under-age conscripts and irregulars were so poorly looked after that it is extraordinary they did not cause more trouble than they did.11
With few forces at his disposal, the governor remained constantly attentive to the prestige of his office. When the French consul accidentally struck Namik Pasha on the arm—the latter had intervened in a quarrel between him and a Jewish neighbour—the governor immediately withdrew from the scene as a mark of his displeasure: in the face of the growing assertiveness of European powers, upholding the authority of the Ottoman state was more important than ever. Husni Pasha imprisoned two elderly men for “the trifling offence” of failing to salute him as his carriage passed by. But maintaining the dignity of the office was one thing, arbitrary violence another, and if a pasha’s behaviour slipped over into needless cruelty, it was openly criticized. After Salik Pasha, “whose equal in anti-Christian feeling it would be difficult to find in any country,” ordered the harsh treatment of some Albanian Catholic families suspected of having abandoned Islam and had them embarked for Constantinople with such brutality that several died, “all classes Christians, Turks and Jews cried ‘Shame’ ” and the Turkish captain of the port confided to the British consul that “such acts are contrary to the Law of God and our Prophet.” Eventually Salik Pasha was recalled by the Porte.12