by Alan Palmer
Ahmed III was the most sophisticated and cultured Sultan for more than a century and a half. His companion, Nedim, was more than a gifted poet; he took charge of the library which Sultan Ahmed founded, and which may still be seen to the west of his turbe, outside the Yeni Cami at the Stamboul end of the Galata Bridge. Elsewhere, too, Sultan Ahmed’s beneficence as a patron of art and learning continues to delight visitors to modern Istanbul: there is no lovelier chamber in the private apartments of the Topkapi Sarayi than Ahmed III’s dining-room, with its intricate gilt-patterned ceiling and lacquered wood panels bright with painted flowers or bowls of fruit; and there is no finer roofed street fountain than the huge ceşme he erected between St Sophia and the Topkapi Sarayi. Across the Bosphorus, outside the mosque beside the old ferry landing-stage in Üsküdar (Scutari), is another fine fountain which, in 1726, Sultan Ahmed commissioned to be placed where the Sacred Caravan set out each year on its fifteen-hundred-mile pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca. And the two slim minarets at Eyüp have stood elegantly flanking the historic mosque ever since Ahmed’s progresses passed that way on their journeys to his dream palace at Sa’adabad.
It is, however, as a lover of flowers that Ahmed III is best remembered. Historically his reign became Lale Devri (Tulip Era). Tulips had followed the Turks westwards from Anatolia, where they were wild flowers; a Habsburg ambassador in the sixteenth century took them back to the Low Countries, where from the 1560s onwards the Dutch began to cultivate the bulb, producing more than twelve hundred different varieties at a time when the flower was no longer of great interest in Constantinople. Ahmed’s father, Sultan Mehmed IV, restored the bulb to imperial favour, first at Edirne and later in the Topkapi Sarayi. But for Ahmed the tulip was an obsession. His palace gardens were planted with row upon row, each variety given a separate bed. New specimens were ordered from the West and from Persia. One autumn the Venetian bailo thought it worthwhile to inform the Doge that a ship had just arrived in the Golden Horn from Marseilles with a cargo of 30,000 bulbs for the Sultan’s gardens. A little later in the century an acerbic French merchant, Jean-Claude Flachat, commented that the Turks set less value on human life ‘than on a horse or a fine tulip’.11
Decorative tiles, lacquered panelling, the binding of books for the new libraries and many other forms of artistic expression made use of the tulip motif, as did the court poets. Every April the Sultan held a tulip festival in the lower terraced garden, beyond the Fourth Courtyard, of the Topkapi Sarayi—the ‘Grand Seraglio’, as foreign envoys called the palace. The festival was timed for two successive evenings, coinciding with the full moon. Turtles (or tortoises) with slow-burning candles on their shells moved around the tulip beds to provide illumination at ground level. On shelves around the wall of the garden were ranged vases of tulips, carefully chosen so that their colours were in harmony when lit by candles in glass bowls among them. Ahmed III received homage, enthroned in state outside the Sofa Köşkü pavilion, to the accompaniment of the twittering of song birds in an improvised aviary suspended from the branches of the overhanging trees. The second evening was always set aside for what was virtually a springtime party to entertain the ladies of the harem. The evening might include a treasure hunt for confectionery or, if the Sultan was in a generous mood, for jewelled trinkets hidden in the garden.
‘The favour of the Grand Vizier increases every day,’ reported the Venetian bailo in January 1724.12 Damat Ibrahim had taken advantage of internal discord in Persia to occupy huge areas of the country on the cheap, militarily speaking, and rich booty and reward were flowing back to Constantinople, lessening the burden of war taxation and encouraging free-spending extravagance at court. But intervention in Persian affairs was rash; feeling against the Ottomans rallied dissident Persian groups, sometimes acting with Afghans who had moved into Persia from the west. By the winter of 1726–7 it was clear to outside observers that Damat Ibrahim was desperately trying to distract his sovereign from a mounting crisis in the East, as well as from constant unrest in Cairo and the difficulties of raising taxes in outlying provinces, some of which were suffering from acute famine. ‘What can be expected of a Sultan lost in the idleness of the Palace, a Vizar who has not seen the face of War, a Kapitan Pasha [admiral] who has never left the castles [defensive forts on the Bosphorus]?’, wrote bailo Dolfin impatiently to the Doge in March 1727; and he added, ‘It is still possible to reverse the situation. The Empire lacks the head, not the arm.’13
Rather surprisingly, Damat Ibrahim survived that crisis. He believed that he remained in touch with the public mood in the capital. Ordinary townsfolk in Stamboul and Galata had benefited from the coming of cheap coffee houses, from the shoring-up of long neglected buildings and the provision of more fountains, and from the institution of the first Ottoman fire brigade, set up in 1720 by Ahmed Gerçek, Louis David by birth, a French convert to Islam. Across the Bosphorus, too, Damat Ibrahim courted popular favour. In March 1729, when he was returning from further palace building at Kandilli, famished peasants at Üsküdar begged him to help find them food. Next day, an ample supply of free bread arrived from the Stamboul bakeries; and the hungry of Üsküdar gave thanks to Allah for the ready response of such a charitable Grand Vizier.
But in the autumn of 1730, after twelve years in office, Damat Ibrahim misread all the signs of popular discontent. Rumour reached the capital that he had accepted a compromise truce with the Persians which involved the surrender of Sunni Muslim villages to the Shi’ites. On 28 September 1730 Patrona Halil, an Albanian-born ex-Janissary who had become a second-hand clothes dealer, began haranguing worshippers outside the Bayezit Mosque; five close companions supported him in denouncing the constant violation of Holy Law by the Grand Vizier and the Sultan’s closest advisers. From the mosque an angry crowd of demonstrators surged towards the Topkapi Sarayi, collecting dissidents from the Janissary barracks as they went. The Janissary mutiny turned a demonstration into an insurrection.14
Damat Ibrahim seems to have thought that the crowd could be easily dispersed. He had forgotten—or did not know—that the most reliable troops were encamped at Üsküdar, on the Anatolian shore, ready to set out eastwards on a further Persian campaign. He also placed unjustifiable confidence in his imperial father-in-law. For when Ahmed III heard that Patrona’s rebels were demanding the heads of the Grand Vizier, the Grand Admiral, and one other ‘westernized’ minister, he obliged them. All three were, as was the custom, swiftly strangled before decapitation; the executioners disturbed the Grand Admiral in his waterside villa as he was transplanting his tulips, totally unaware of any political crisis in downtown Stamboul.
If Ahmed III thought that by sacrificing his ministerial cronies he could save his throne, he was mistaken. Along both banks of the Golden Horn there followed two days of rioting, arson and looting—a sudden show of cultural xenophobia towards anything thought to be ‘Frankish’ (western). On 1 October Ahmed abdicated, under threat of deposition, making obeisance to his thirty-four-year-old nephew, Mahmud I, who had been confined in the kafe ever since his seventh birthday. Back to the kafe went the ‘tulip king’, spending the last six years of his life only a few hundred yards from the pavilion where he had sat in floral majesty each April. His daughter Princess Fatma—Damat Ibrahim’s widow—was imprisoned a year later for plotting to restore her father, and it is possible that Ahmed’s death, in his sixty-third year, was hastened by poison, although no Sultan since Suleiman I had survived into his sixties.
Ahmed III had reigned for twenty-seven years. Against all expectancy, his nephew remained on the throne for twenty-four. For thirteen months after his accession, foreign envoys looked on Mahmud as a mere puppet of Patrona Halil and his bully boys, rebels who set fire to most of the exquisite palaces and kiosks of the Tulip Years. Their leader grew rich very quickly, as boss of a city-wide protection racket. Momentarily it seemed he might find an even broader field in which to peculate; on 24 November 1731 the Sultan invited Patrona Halil and his chief supporters to com
e to the palace in order to discuss plans for another Persian War. No such discussion took place. Soon after their arrival in the Topkapi Sarayi, Patrona Halil and his associates were seized, and strangled on the spot. Mahmud could now rule in his own right, entrusting the administration to Grand Viziers sympathetic towards westernizing reform, but more cautious than Damat Ibrahim and less tenacious of office.
Much survived the Patrona Terror, most notably Muteferrika’s printing press. There was even an imperial tulip festival each spring, albeit trimmed down to economy size. Like Ahmed III, Mahmud showed an interest in books and education, at least in his capital city: a small library outside the Mosque of the Conqueror and a primary school attached to the mosque of Ayasofya are still standing. He also completed a project, abandoned in the previous reign, for supplying water piped from outlying reservoirs to Pera, Galata and the northern shore of the Golden Horn; the octagonal water distribution centre (taksim), erected on the Sultan’s orders, is still at the top of Istiklal Caddesi (modern Istanbul’s Regent Street or Rue de Rivoli) and has given its name to Taksim Meydani, which it is tempting to call Istanbul’s Piccadilly Circus.
These projects belong mainly to Mahmud I’s later years, as also does the patronage he extended to the building of Stamboul’s first Baroque mosque, the Nurousmaniye Cami, next to the Bazaar. He had begun his personal rule by giving urgent attention to defects in the methods of tax collection; a new law improving the efficiency of the timar system was issued as early as January 1732. Later in that same year Ibrahim Muteferrika presented the Sultan with a printed edition of his own treatise, some fifty pages long, an inquiry into the science of ruling the nations, Usul ul-hikem fi nizam al-uman. He described the types of government existing in other states, urged the sovereign to relate external policies to the geographical structure of neighbouring lands, and suggested how the Ottomans might learn from the military science and discipline of infidel armies—towards whom Muteferrika dutifully showed a tactful contempt.15 Mahmud I was impressed; and, like many later Sultans, he turned for advice to a foreign expert. The Comte de Bonneval would, he hoped, modernize the Ottoman army, making it once again the conquering vanguard of Islam.
Claude-Alexandre, Comte de Bonneval, a French general from the Limousin, had every confidence that he could live up to what he assumed to be the Sultan’s expectations. He was fifty-two when in 1727 he entered Ottoman service, having fought for and against Louis XIV and served under Prince Eugene against the Turks before falling out with his commanding general and spending a year in prison. The Venetian Republic had nothing to offer him and so he travelled down to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), crossed into Bosnia, accepted conversion to Islam, and made ready to fight for the Sultan. After a few months observing the Ottoman army, he prepared a memorandum for Mahmud I, explaining how he would create new fighting units of infantry and artillery, to be trained by young hand-picked officers; and how he would restore the Janissaries as an élite fighting force by grouping several orta in the corps into regiments, thus giving officers a regular ladder of promotion on the model of the French and Austrian armies which he already knew so well. Foreign-born military advisers—German, Austrian and Scottish officers, in particular—had played a considerable role in modernizing the Russian army: one in four of Peter the Great’s senior commanders was a non-Russian, and the new guards regiments founded by his successor, Empress Anna, were almost entirely raised and trained by foreigners. To assist him, Bonneval knew he would have three somewhat younger French officers who had converted to Islam, together with some Irish and Scottish soldiers of fortune and, possibly, some Swedes. On paper there seemed no reason why ‘Ahmed’—as Bonneval was now known—should not give the Sultan a fighting force to match the army of his northern neighbour.
The vicissitudes of Bonneval’s career well illustrate the difficulties facing any reformer at the Sultan’s court. In September 1731 the Grand Vizier Topal Osman invited him to modernize a single section of the Sultan’s army, the humbaraciyan or bombardier corps, responsible for making, transporting and firing all explosive weapons (mortar bombs, grenades, mines) on land or aboard a naval vessel. He was provided with a training ground and barracks outside Üsküdar, consulted over the construction of a cannon foundry and musket factory, and asked to draft a memorandum for the Sublime Porte on foreign policy. But six months later Grand Vizier Topal Osman was replaced by an Italian-born convert, Hekimolu Ali, who was so dependent on the conservatively-minded Janissary leaders that he dared not support army reform until he had been in office for some two years. By the autumn of 1734, however, Bonneval was back in grace: on his recommendation a military engineering school was set up in Üsküdar; and in January 1735 he was made a high-ranking dignitary, entitled to two horsetails.
For the last twelve years of his life Claude-Alexandre became Kumbaraci Osman Ahmed Pasha. He could not, however, rely on Mahmud’s continued support. Yet another Grand Vizier came into office in July 1735, and a year later the Pasha was exiled from the capital to Katamonu in northern Anatolia; funds for the bombardiers and the new army institutions were at once cut off. Somehow, in 1740, he slipped back to Üsküdar, but Janissary suspicion and jealousy made certain he never again enjoyed great influence. His grandiose plans for modernizing the army were ignored, although he was allowed to continue running his military engineering school until his death at the age of seventy-two. ‘A man of great talent for war, intelligent and eloquent, charming and gracious’, commented a French envoy; ‘very proud, a lavish spender, extremely debauched and a great philanderer.’16
Bonneval’s reforms contributed to the success of Ottoman armies in the sporadic campaigns from 1736 to 1739 against Russia and Austria. Sultan Mahmud’s armies recovered much of Serbia, including Belgrade, and strengthened the Ottoman hold on Bosnia. Throughout Mahmud’s reign the Sublime Porte had to look defensively to the east, as well as to the north and west, for in Persia the ruthless Khan Nadir Afshar seized power and in 1737 was recognized as Shah. Mahmud and Nadir exchanged gifts: an ornate oval throne, plated with gold and adorned with pearls, rubies and diamonds, was presented by the Shah to the Sultan; while Mahmud in return sent to Nadir a golden dagger, with three large emeralds in the hilt beneath another emerald which covered a watch. But despite such costly diplomatic courtesies, Sultan and Shah were at war for most of Nadir’s reign, fighting largely indecisive campaigns in Mesopotamia, although the Persians gained some success in the southern Caucasus. The danger receded with the assassination of Nadir in 1747, an event which enabled the Sultan to recover the golden dagger he had presented. Both gifts are on show in the Topkapi Sarayi treasury, the dagger having (in 1964) featured in Topkapi, a film based upon Eric Ambler’s thriller The Light of Day.
Shah Nadir’s murder came at the start of an unexpected interlude in Ottoman history. Between 1746 and 1768, the Empire was at peace. Never before had twenty-two years passed without war along at least one frontier; and the country was to enjoy no comparable respite until the Kemalist Revolution and the proclamation of a republic. Yet as the Ottoman Empire was essentially a military institution, the ‘long peace’ proved curiously debilitating. Only one Grand Vizier—Koça Mehmed Ragip, in the late 1750s—tried to arrest the decline of effective government; he dispatched troops to stamp out banditry in Rumelia, Anatolia and Syria; and he appointed supervisors to check corruption in the evkaf and ensure that the revenue from religious endowments was applied to pious or charitable work.17 But despite Ragip’s efforts three familiar abuses soon crept back into the administration: the sale of offices; nepotism; and the taking of bribes. Instead of building on the reforms of the past quarter of a century, the Janissaries sought to put the clock back. Turkish printing virtually ceased, to the great relief of the professional scribes and calligraphers who had feared competition. After Ibrahim Muteferrika’s death in 1745 only two volumes were published in eleven years, and the press thereafter stood idle until 1784 when Sultan Abdulhamid I issued an imperial edict on the need to re-establish Tu
rkish printing. A similar halt was called to all efforts at army or navy reform. Bonneval’s military engineering school only outlived its founder by three years; and almost two decades passed before any further attempt was made to modernize the Ottoman army.
During the ‘long peace’ it is doubtful whether the Sultans or their viziers in Constantinople were fully aware of the extent to which the empire was falling apart. The North African lands, from Libya westwards, were by now no more than nominal vassal states. In 1711 Ahmed III had recognized the hereditary rule of the Qaramanli family in Tripolitania and the Husaynid dynasty as beys of Tunis, as well as accepting the right of local Janissaries to nominate a governor in Algeria who would share power with three provincial beys. In Cairo a rapid succession of Ottoman viceroys had proved ineffectual: Egypt was virtually ‘governed’—a euphemistic verb in this context—by rival Mameluke princes, working sometimes with and sometimes against the resident Janissaries. The chronic civil war permitted Bedouin to encroach on the fertile lands of the Nile delta, gravely hampering cultivation; there was a major famine in Cairo on four occasions during the reign of Egypt’s nominal sovereign, Sultan Ahmed III. The famines were almost as bad in Mesopotamia, where Bedouin incursions brought the desert back to a fertile region on the Tigris north of Baghdad. In Mosul, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus by the middle of the century, the vali was, in effect, a hereditary governor-general, his family forming an embryonic local dynasty safeguarded by a private army. Syria forwarded to Constantinople no more than a quarter of the revenue claimed by the imperial government as tribute money; and other outlying provinces were no better. Even the few imperial duties laid on local governors were sometimes disastrously neglected. The most notorious incident was the failure of local notables who had secured the hereditary governorship of Damascus from the Sultan to protect the pilgrim caravan from attack by Bedouin horsemen on its way to Mecca in 1757; on that occasion the raiders left 20,000 devout Muslims dead, among them a sister of the spineless Sultan, Osman III—who died from apoplexy soon after news of the raid reached his capital.18