by Tom Anderson
Therefore, while the Famine is remembered in Scotland as a crime de guerre in which Churchill and his thrice-damned son left the Highland Crofters to starve, in Ireland it is remembered as the second act in the reconciliation between the Emerald Isle and her larger neighbour; still a tragedy, of course, but nonetheless a time when the flower of hope was one plant that suffered no blight.
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From: “The Exiliad: A Brief History of the Empire of New Spain” by Pavel Matin (1969)—
…soon, though, it was not Irish immigration to the former western Texas that consumed the attention of Emperor Charles. Matters further west had come to a head.
In 1818, the explorer Miguel Juan Díaz y Franco was part of an effort organised by King Antonio of Mexico to explore the upper reaches of the Río de los Americanos (American River) in New California. This was in turn only part of a wider operation to map the previously largely unknown country, both to secure the coast against Russian and American colonisation and also to enforce the Empire of New Spain’s will over all its claimed territory. To do so they would need to attract colonists, which meant they had to map the good arable farmland.
Díaz succeeded rather better than King Antonio had expected. While crossing the river he found reflective yellow flakes were left on his boots, and to his surprise they remained shiny even after the water had dried. When he returned to Monterey, the rapidly growing new capital of Mexico, he had an apothecary perform some tests – after which point his attempts to keep the discovery secret were futile.
Gold had been found in New California.[265] What the native Indians would call the Golden Plague had broken out – and who could say where it would end…?
Chapter #99: Mehmedic Mutination
“I once met a travelling gentleman – or at least a gentleman who could sufficiently produce the impression of having travelled to be treated as such, and truly is there any difference save to the philosophers? – who claimed to me that the Grand Turk regards himself as the natural successor to the old Greek Emperors of Constantinople. A claim that would be disputed, doubtless, by the Czar among others; yet to judge by the confused state of the accounts (if one is to dignify them with that name) in the papers of recent events in the East, it would appear that the Grand Signor indeed possesses at least one piece of evidence to back up his assertion: his Empire is truly byzantine.”
- Giovanni Tressino, 1829[266]
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From: “The Time of Troubles: A History of the Ottoman Empire, 1816-1841” by Giuseppe Guiccardini (1956, English translation 1960)—
Any history of the Ottoman state must begin with the acknowledgement that attempting to pin down the truth, to paraphrase Dr Jonathan Brewer in Sublime Porte and Ridiculous Retorts, is akin not only to attempting to find a needle in a haystack, but then being asked what colour was the shirt it was used to sew. In all of modern historical scholarship, only two fields spring to mind which require even greater guesswork: early Jacobin France and pre-Russian Yapon. In both cases, destruction of primary sources (systematically and deliberately as well as by accident) necessarily require one to rely on imperfect secondary sources, tainted by ignorance and█ █ █ █ █, in an attempt to reconstruct the truth. Or at least a picture of something that might pass for the truth in a dim light, as Brewer added whimsically.[267]
But to return from such digressions – the problem of understanding the Time of Troubles, as the period we shall examine has become known (in imitation of its Russian prototype), is ultimately the lack of reliable sources. The Ottoman account naturally lauds the victors and has made all efforts to expunge any records giving different perspectives. Even those which survive are invariably just as biased in the opposite direction to the official account. Things are hampered further by the tendency towards poetic and ambiguous language among the most senior (and therefore most well informed and qualified to give accounts of events) officials in that period.
Yet if we must, if not quite dismiss Ottoman sources, then at least weigh them with a pinch of salt – then what of Europe? As every schoolboy knows, Europe in this period was undergoing a massive growth in communications thanks to the innovations that the Jacobin Wars had produced. Not only technological changes such as the growth of Optel networks, but social trends towards broader literacy and popular interest in current events. It was a golden age for newspapers, which underwent an economic ascent [boom] despite widespread█ █ █ █ █ by the authoritarian regimes that so characterised the Watchful Peace.[268] Yet even in places where a free press flourished, accounts of Ottoman affairs are usually suspect. At best they tend to be coloured with ignorance due to the complexity of affairs at the Topkapi Palace even for those experienced in diplomatic affairs, which journalists usually were (and are) not. Often matters are made worse by how the Ottomans were (and are!) regarded through the prism of European worldviews. The Ottoman political and military systems were naturally influenced by the Asian steppe in their genesis, while the religion of Islam and even practices inherited from the Byzantines served to create a structure that defied easy comprehension by Europeans. For example, succession to the Sultanate, though specific practices varied over time, was always in stark contrast to the systems employed both in Europe and even in other ‘alien’ and poorly understood states such as China.
In the sixteenth century, the established practice had been for the reigning Sultan to appoint his sons as governors of various provinces of the Empire, then upon his death for them to race back to Constantinople and, if necessary, fight each other until the strongest prevailed. Europeans regarded such a system as incomprehensibly barbaric, essentially a case of regularly scheduling civil wars. Later the Ottomans experimented with the system due to concerns raised over the female members of the royal family (in particular the Valide Sultan or Queen Mother, who was often a foreigner) having too much influence over the court. A system of agnatic seniority was adopted, where the oldest male member of the House of Osmanli was Sultan; therefore, a Sultan on his deathbed was often succeeded by his younger brother or nephew rather than his son.
For a time it was common practice for a Sultan to have his male relations (even his sons) strangled to stabilise his position; however, this naturally almost caused the extinction of the House of Osmanli more than once, and instead the slightly more humane approach was taken of imprisoning possible claimants in the Kafes or ‘cage’, a luxurious but isolated set of apartments within the Topkapi Palace. This isolation, though good for the stability of the reigning Sultan, often led to the male heirs developing alienistical [psychological] problems which in turn had begun to cause serious issues for the Empire by the start of the Time of Troubles.[269] Although the reality was open to criticism, the Kafes isolation was often misrepresented in European sources as being that of a barbaric prison cell, casting further Western scorn on the Ottoman political system. It is perhaps worth noting that a Cytherean [feminist] argument is often made at this point that European opposition to Ottoman practices was more founded in resentment of the high (if unofficial) position of women in the Ottoman court, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this work (Harem of Power by Judith A. Flanigan is an excellent introduction to the subject).
Islam did not help the situation, particularly in states such as Russia, Austria and to some extent the Italian states, which saw the Turk as their blood enemy and inevitably saw events in the Empire through that lens of bias. What really complicates the matter, however, is the sense in much of Europe (though often for different reasons in the East than the West) that the Ottoman Empire was failing when to any objective eye it was not. This view was taken at the most astonishing times, recited by otherwise reliable commentators at times as absurd as the mid-sixteenth century when the Empire was at the height of its power, or just before the invasion of Austria in the 1680s and the near-conquest of Vienna by Ottoman troops, or immediately afterwards. Nor is the attitude limited to those accounts from the countries with a historical enmity to the Turk. It is easy
to find talk by English traders of the early seventeenth century of how the Sublime Porte is lapsing into stagnation and decay and will surely fall soon, never mind that forces under Ottoman auspices had occupied an island only twelve miles off the coast of England![270] It is startling how the Dutchman or the Portugee of the same period will praise to the high heavens some African and Asian empires which are no longer remembered even as a footnote in most histories, yet are dismissive of the Grand Signor’s empire.
What is behind this attitude? In part it is merely a development of the holdover ideas of Christian Europe in the Dark Ages and the age of the Crusades; Muslims are ‘the Other’ against which Christian Europe defines itself. Yet this alone cannot justify the perpetual belief that the Ottoman state was ever on the verge of collapse; the Christians of Spain certainly had no such far-fetched notion about their Ummayid and Almoravid enemies, and the same is true of the Crusader states’ regard for Saladin. No; alien Ottoman practices, and European lack of understanding, must also be taken into account. In particular to European eyes the court looked perpetually unstable, with Grand Viziers rarely lasting a year in the job. The position of the Sultan himself, in terms of power, vacillated wildly from absolute monarch to powerless puppet and back again, depending on the individual, and just who he was a puppet of also varied.
Most significantly of all, there were the Janissaries. The Janissaries were at the heart of European revulsion towards the Turk, being originally Christian boys taken from their families and raised into Islam. By the eighteenth century they had also come to embody conservatism in the Ottoman state. As the scientific and technological advances of the period reinvented warfare (and indeed peacetime practices) elsewhere, the Ottoman Empire was perpetually held back by the quiet stranglehold of reactionary influence the Janissaries possessed, having graduated from elite bodyguard corps to mainstream army to decadent ruling class. Instead of being recruited young and put through strong physical training as before, the Janissaries soon automatically succeeded their fathers in the corps and many of them never saw battle. Murmurs of military or political reform from any sector of the government were met with ruthless action; the Bosporus swallowed a lot of bodies. There was talk that even the Sultan himself was afraid of being overthrown if he made any moves in that direction.[271]
At the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth, while Europe and indeed the world beyond was shaken to its foundations by the ignition of revolutionary fervour, the Ottomans – with a lazy sense of historical inevitability, perhaps, given their aforementioned tendency towards apparent contrariness – were shifting towards a more conservative settlement. The primary cause was the fact that the Janissaries and other political reactionaries could point to great recent victories under the current system, so why was change needed? Let us now consider those victories in turn.
Firstly, we must understand that the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century had been a very mixed period of military history for the Ottomans. Only the Turks’ intervention in the Great Northern War in 1710 had returned a decisive victory for Constantinople, regaining the fortress city of Azov (which often changed hands) and forcing the Russians to demolish several of their own fortresses. Most conflicts after that, however, ended in defeat for the Ottomans; rarely swingeing losses, with wounds far from mortal, but nonetheless highly unsatisfactory outcomes for the Porte. In 1716 the Ottomans attacked Austria after Austria threatened war due to the Ottomans retaking the Morea from the Venetians, but in the end the Austrians won the day, taking control of the Banat of Temesvar[272] and pushing the Turks south of the Danube. In 1735 the Ottomans faced both Russians and Austrians together. The Turks fought well and actually regained land from Austria in the Balkans, but lost Azov to the Russians. At the same time more mixed results were seen in ongoing conflicts with the Persians, with Nadir Shah wreaking havoc in Mesopotamia but failing to consolidate any real lasting gains. Most significantly, the Crimean War of 1773-7, sparked by Ottoman-backed Crimean raids on Russian farmlands, was the most decisive blow to fall and ripped the Crimean Khanate from the Ottomans’ orbit, instead creating a Russian puppet.[273]
However, the next twenty years were a time of relative peace for the Empire, with Europe consumed with its own wars and Persia emerging from its civil war to create the liberal Zand state. When the Russian Civil War came about in 1796, Sultan Abdulhamid II took advantage of the confusion to quietly re-extend Ottoman influence into the Crimea and the Caucasus. It was at this point that Azov – vacated by Russian troops – was demolished by undercover Janissaries in Crimean Khan Devlet IV’s soldiers’ raiment. The cautious Abdulhamid did not believe the Ottomans could hold the city without provoking an eventual war, and was concerned by what at the time looked like rising Austrian power, observing Ferdinand IV’s temporary success in partially reuniting the Holy Roman Empire behind him against the French Revolution. Abdulhamid had no desire to fight another two-front war with both Austria and Russia, and therefore limited his moves. He did not formally declare war on either Russian claimant court and kept Constantinople’s influence in the Crimea fairly low-key (though no less real). Later, after his death, the Sultan’s instincts were proved essentially correct when the Ottomans bought Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War by conceding part of their zone of influence in the Caucasus alone; trying to hold Azov would have made war unavoidable.
It was that Austro-Turkish War, from 1799 to 1803, which ultimately created the conditions that let to the Time of Troubles – paradoxically, as that war was a great victory for the Ottomans. Led by the Bosniak general Damat Melek Pasha, the armies of Sultan Murad V stabbed Austria in the back just after General Mozart had thrown back Ledoux’s armies from Vienna at the cost of his own life. The Ottomans obtained their cited war aims of acquiring nearly all the former Venetian territories in Dalmatia, taking advantage of the Republican French abolition of the Porte’s old naval foe, the Venetian Republic. In addition to this, they were able to reverse some of the Austrians’ Balkan territorial gains in the last century.
This victory was swiftly followed by another, the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09. Persia was faced with a two-front war, with the Durrani Empire of the Afghans and the Khanate of Kalat both taking advantage of the conflict to strike in the east. The Ottomans won control of Ilam and Khuzestan along the border with Persia, along with control of the Azeri lands which Persia had originally obtained from Russia during the Russian Civil War. Damat Melek Pasha was elevated to Grand Vizier in 1806 and proved extraordinarily resilient to court intrigue. Most Grand Viziers lasted mere months, some managing a few years – Dalmat lasted a full decade, one of the longest-serving in Ottoman history, and when his death came in 1816 it was of natural causes – ‘practically unprecedented’, The Ringleader (inaccurately) described it. His strength of position was due to his being backed to the hilt by the Janissaries, with the other potential candidates for the vizierate all being considered less conservative than Dalmat. Furthermore, he was relatively well liked by the people for his military victories and reasonably acceptable tax regime, meaning there were fewer conspirators to unseat him and fewer candidates for them to rally around. Of course, there was always the potential for the Sultan or other members of the imperial court to dismiss him, but Dalmat proved equal to that challenge.
Murad V, his great ally as Sultan, is thought to have died of natural causes in 1811, though this is not entirely certain. It was not unprecedented, however, the agnatic seniority succession system meaning many sultans were old men by the time they ascended to the sultanate. He was succeeded by his younger brothers Osman IV (1811-1812) and Mahmud II (1812), neither of whom approved of Dalmat, and both of whom were mysteriously found to have accidentally brutally suffered fatal accidents. The next sultan was a nephew, Ahmed IV, who sensibly decided to sit quietly and let the Vizier take care of matters of state. It helped that he was one of those whom the Kafes had driven to an alienistical condition – ‘mad’ as a descripti
on was rejected by contemporary commentators, but he was certainly very silent and biddable. Although some of the stories may be attributed to idle rumour or tales told in retrospect, there is a broad agreement that he never sought anything more than a story from the members of his Harem. Most tales also concur that he was not a paederast, as some have thought, but rather an Eislerian.[274]
Whatever the truth about the Sultan, the Janissary-backed Damat cemented his iron grip over the Ottoman state. While he was not a bad ruler in many ways, his monopolisation of power meant that the opposition that had previously burned itself out in successive minor coups and intrigue now slowly built up. Pieter de Greef, in The Imaginary Continent, makes the point that, despite the Ottoman government dismissing the ideological questions unleashed by the Jacobin Wars as ‘a Christian affair’, it had nonetheless found itself in a similar situation to states such as Austria and Great Britain; a coherent and absolutely ruling reactionary, authoritarian regime that could do nothing but polarise politics and force all opposition forces to coalesce into a single, dangerous whole.
That whole was composed of elements that indeed had little in common with each other. It included those interested in political liberal reform for its own sake, usually influenced by Zand Persian ideas (doubtless helped by the annexation of Khuzestan and Ilam) and therefore having its strongest position in Mesopotamia; this group was known as the Azadis (“Freedomites”) and illegally circulated pamphlets printed from portable printing presses. One of their most significant thinkers used the pen name Ibn Warraq (“son of a printer”), a traditional pseudonym for dissident Muslim writers afraid of reprisals. Although most Azadis were Iraqis, the Grand Vizier’s spies suggested that an analysis of Ibn Warraq’s writings implied he was an upper-class Ottoman Turk, a worrying sign.