by Will Durant
2. Morals
The diversity of Ottoman from Christian ways flagrantly illustrated the geographical and temporal variation of moral codes. Polygamy reigned quietly where Byzantine Christianity had so recently exacted formal monogamy; women hid themselves in seraglios, or behind veils, where once they had mounted the throne of the Caesars; and Suleiman attended dutifully to the needs of his harem with none of the qualms of conscience that might have disturbed or enhanced the sexual escapades of Francis I, Charles V, Henry VIII, or Alexander VI. Turkish civilization, like that of ancient Greece, kept women in the background, and allowed considerable freedom to sexual deviations. Ottoman homosexuality flourished where “Greek friendship” had once won battles and inspired philosophers.
The Turks were allowed by the Koran four wives and some concubines, but only a minority could afford the extravagance. The warring Ottomans, often far removed from their wonted women, took as wives or concubines, currente thalamo, the widows or daughters of the Christians they had conquered. No racial prejudice intervened: Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Mongol, Persian, Arab women were welcomed with open arms, and became the mothers of children who were all alike accepted as legitimate and Ottoman. Adultery was hardly necessary under the circumstances, and when it occurred it was severely punished: the woman was obliged to buy an ass and ride it through the city; the man was flogged with a hundred strokes, and was required to kiss and reward the executioner who dealt them. A husband could secure a divorce by a mere declaration of intent, but a wife could free herself only by complex and deterrent litigation.
Suleiman remained a bachelor till his fortieth year. Since the wife of Bajazet I had been captured and allegedly abused by Timur and his Tatars, the Ottoman sultans, to forestall another such indignity, had made it a rule not to marry, and to admit none but slaves to their bed.35 Suleiman’s seraglio contained some 300 concubines, all bought in the market or captured in war, and nearly all of Christian origin. When they expected a visit from the Sultan they attired themselves in their finest robes, and stood in line to greet him; he saluted courteously as many as time allowed, and placed his handkerchief on the shoulder of one who especially pleased him. That evening, on retiring, he asked that the recipient should return his handkerchief. The next morning she would be presented with a dress of cloth of gold, and her allowance would be increased. The sultan might remain in the harem two or three nights, spreading his bounty; then he returned to his own palace, to live day and night with men. Women rarely appeared in his palace, and took no part in state dinners or ceremonies. Nevertheless it was considered a great honor to be assigned to the seraglio. Any inmate of it who reached the age of twenty-five without earning a handkerchief was freed, and usually found a husband of high estate. In Suleiman’s case the institution did not lead to physical degeneration, for in most matters he was a man of signal moderation.
Social life among the Ottomans was unisexual, and lacked the gay stimulus of women’s charms and laughing chatter. Yet manners were as refined as in Christendom, probably more refined than in any lands except China, India, Italy, and France. Domestic slaves were numerous, but they were humanely treated, many laws protected them, and manumission was easy.36 Though public sanitation was poor, personal cleanliness was common. The institution of public baths, which the Persians seem to have taken from Hellenistic Syria, was transmitted to the Turks. In Constantinople and other large cities of the Ottoman Empire the public baths were built of marble and attractively decorated. Some Christian saints had prided themselves on avoiding water; the Moslem was required to make his ablutions before entering the mosque or saying his prayers; in Islam cleanliness was really next to godliness. Table manners were no better than in Christendom; meals were eaten with the fingers off wooden plates; there were no forks. Wine was never drunk in the house; there was much drinking of it in taverns, but there was less drunkenness than in Western lands.37 Coffee came into use among the Moslems in the fourteenth century; we hear of it first in Abyssinia; thence it appears to have passed into Arabia. The Moslems, we are told, used it originally to keep themselves awake during religious services.38 We find no mention of it by a European writer till 1592.39
Physically the Turk was tough and strong, and famed for endurance. Busbeq was astonished to note how some Turks received a hundred blows on the soles of their feet or on their ankles, “so that sometimes several sticks of dogwood are broken on them, without drawing any cry of pain.” 40 Even the ordinary Turk carried himself with dignity, helped by robes that concealed the absurdities of the well-fed form. Commoners donned a simple fez, which dressy persons enveloped in a turban. Both sexes had a passion for flowers; Turkish gardens were famous for their color; thence, apparently, came into Western Europe the lilac, tulip, mimosa, cherry laurel, and ranunculus. There was an esthetic side to the Turks which their wars hardly revealed. We are surprised to be told by Christian travelers that except in war they were “not by nature cruel,” but “docile, tractable, gentle... lovable,” and “generally kind.” 41 Francis Bacon complained that they seemed kinder to animals than to men.42 Cruelty emerged when security of the faith was threatened; then the wildest passion was let loose.
The Turkish code was especially hard in war. No foe was entitled to quarter; women and children were spared, but able-bodied enemies, even if unarmed and unresisting, might be slaughtered without sin.43 And yet many cities captured by Turks fared better than Turkish cities captured by Christians. When Ibrahim Pasha took Tabriz and Baghdad (1534), he forbade his soldiers to pillage them or harm the inhabitants; when Suleiman again took Tabriz (1548) he too preserved it from plunder or massacre; but when Charles V took Tunis (1535), he could pay his army only by letting it loot. Turkish law, however, rivaled the Christian in barbarous penalties. Thieves had a hand cut off to shorten their grasp.44
Official morals were as in Christendom. The Turks were proud of their fidelity to their word, and they usually kept the terms of capitulation offered to surrendering foes. But Turkish casuists, like such Christian counterparts as St. John Capistrano, held that no promise could bind the faithful against the interest or duties of their religion, and that the sultan might abrogate his own treaties, as well as those of his predecessors.45 Christian travelers reported “honesty, a sense of justice... benevolence, integrity, and charity” in the average Turk,46 but practically all Turkish office-holders were open to bribery; a Christian historian adds that most Turkish officials were ex-Christians,47 but we should further add that they had been brought up as Moslems. In the provinces the Turkish pasha, like the Roman proconsul, hastened to amass a fortune before the whim of the ruler replaced him; he exacted from his subjects the full price that he had paid for his appointment. The sale of offices was as common in Constantinople or Cairo as in Paris or Rome.
3. Letters and Arts
The weakest link in Ottoman civilization was its poor equipment for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. Popular education was generally neglected; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Instruction was mostly confined to students intending to study pedagogy, law, or administration; in these fields the curriculum was lengthy and severe. Mohammed II and Suleiman took time to reorganize and improve the madrasas, and the viziers rivaled the sultans in gifts to these mosque colleges. Teachers in these institutions enjoyed a higher social and financial status than their counterparts in Latin Christendom. Their lectures were formally on the Koran, but they managed to include literature, mathematics, and philosophy; and their graduates, though richer in theology than in science, kept fully abreast of the West in engineering and government.
Only a small minority of the population could read, but nearly all of these wrote poetry, not excepting Suleiman. Like the Japanese, the Turks held public competitions in which poets read their offerings; Suleiman took a courtly pleasure in presiding over such Parnassian games. The Turks honored a hundred poets in this age, but our immersion in our own grandeur and idiom has left u
s unaware of even their greatest lyric poet, Mahmud Abdu’l-Baqi. His career spanned four reigns, for though he was forty when Suleiman died, he had another thirty-four years of life in him. He gave up his early trade as a saddler to live by his verse, and would surely have suffered want had not Suleiman befriended him with sinecures. Adding praise to profit, the Sultan wrote a poem on the excellence of Baqi’s poetry. Baqi paid him back in a powerful dirge mourning Suleiman’s death. Even in the translation, which loses dignity by seeking to preserve the multiple rhymes of the original, something of the poem’s passion and splendor emerges:
Prince of Fortune’s cavalier! he to whose charger bold,
Whene’er he caracoled or pranced, cramped was earth’s tourney-square!
He to the luster of whose sword the Magyar bowed his head!
He, the dread gleaming of whose brand the Frank can well declare!
Like tender rose-leaf, gently laid he in the dust his face;
And Earth, the Treasurer, placed him like a jewel in the case.
In truth he was the radiance of rank high and glory great,
A Shah, Iskander-diademed, of Dara’s armed state;
Before the dust beneath his feet the Sphere bent low its head;
Earth’s shrine of adoration was his royal pavilion’s gate.
The smallest of his gifts the meanest beggar made a prince;
Exceeding bounteous, exceeding kind a potentate! ....
Weary and worn by this sad, changeful Sphere, deem not thou him;
Near God to be did he his rank and glory abdicate.
What wonder if our eyes no more life and the world behold!
His beauty fair, as sun and moon, did earth irradiate ....
Now let the cloud blood drop on drop weep, and its form bend low!
And let the Judas-tree anew in blossoms gore-hued blow!
With this sad anguish let the stars’ eyes rain down bitter tears,
And let the smoke from hearts on fire the heavens all darkened show ...
The bird, his soul, hath, huma-like, aloft flown to the skies,
And naught remaineth save a few bones on the earth below...
Eternal may the glory of the heaven-high Khosru dwell!
Blessings be on the monarch’s soul and spirit—and farewell! 48
The Turks were too busy conquering powerful states to have much time for those delicate arts that had heretofore distinguished Islam. Some fine Turkish miniatures were produced, with characteristic simplicity of design and breadth of style. Representative painting was left to the scandalous Christians, who in this age continued to adorn with frescoes the walls of their churches and monasteries; so Manuel Panselinos, perhaps borrowing some stimulus from Italian Renaissance murals, frescoed the church of Protaton on Mount Athos (1535–36) with paintings freer, bolder, more graceful, than those of Byzantine times. The sultans imported artists from West and East—Gentile Bellini from Venice, Shah Kali and Wali Jan, miniaturists, from heretical Persia. In painted tiles, however, the Ottomans needed no alien aid; they used them to dazzling effect. Iznik made a name with the excellence of its faïence. Scutari, Brusa, and Hereke, all in Asia Minor, specialized in textiles; their brocades and velvets, adorned with floral themes in crimson and gold, impressed and influenced Venetian and Flemish designers. Turkish carpets lacked the poetic brilliance of the Persian, but their stately patterns and warm colors evoked admiration in Europe. Colbert induced Louis XIV to order French weavers to copy some Turkish palace rugs, but to no avail; the Islamic mastery remained beyond the reach of Occidental skill.
Turkish art reached its peak in the mosques of Constantinople.* Not even Mashhad in its crowded architectural splendor, nor Isfahan in the days of Shah Abbas, perhaps only Persepolis under Xerxes, equaled, in Persian or Moslem history, the grandeur of Suleiman’s capital. Here the spoils of Ottoman victories were shared with Allah in monuments expressing at once piety and pride, and the determination of the sultans to awe their people with art as well as arms. Suleiman rivaled his grandfather, Mohammed the Conqueror, in building; seven mosques rose to his order; and one of these (1556), taking his name, surpassed St. Sophia in beauty, even while imitating its assemblage of minor cupolas around a central dome; here, however, the minarets, raising their treble prayer to audacious heights, served as sparkling counterpoint to the massive base. The interior is a confusing wealth of decoration: golden inscriptions on marble or faïence, columns of porphyry, arches of white or black marble, windows of stained glass set in traceried stone, pulpit carved as if it were a lifetime’s dedication; this is perhaps too sumptuous for reverence, too brilliant for prayer. An Albanian, Sinan, designed this mosque and seventy more, and lived, we are told, to the age of one hundred and ten.
V. SULEIMAN HIMSELF
It was the West that named Suleiman “the Magnificent”; his own people called him Kanuni, the Lawgiver, because of his share in codifying Ottoman law. He was magnificent not in appearance but in the size and equipment of his armies, in the scope of his campaigns, in the adornment of his city, in the building of mosques, palaces, and the famous “Forty Arches” aqueduct; magnificent in the splendor of his surroundings and retinue; magnificent, of course, in the power and reach of his rule. His empire marched from Baghdad to within ninety miles of Vienna, to within 120 miles of Venice, the Adriatic’s quondam queen. Except in Persia and Italy all the cities celebrated in Biblical and classical lore were his: Carthage, Memphis, Tyre, Nineveh, Babylon, Palmyra, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Smyrna, Damascus, Ephesus, Nicaea, Athens, and two Thebes. Never had the Crescent held so many lands and seas in the hollow of its curve.
Was the excellence of his rule commensurate with its extent? Probably not, but we should have to say this of any spacious realm except Achaemenid Persia and Rome under the Antonines. The area governed was too vast to be well administered from one center before the coming of modern communications, transport, and roads. Laxity and corruption ran through the government; yet Luther said: “It is reported that there is no better temporal rule than among the Turks.”49 In religious toleration Suleiman was bolder and more generous than his Christian compeers: these thought religious conformity necessary to national strength; Suleiman allowed Christians and Jews to practice their religion freely. “The Turks,” wrote Cardinal Pole, “do not compel others to adopt their belief. He who does not attack their religion may profess among them what religion he will; he is safe.”50 In November 1561, while Scotland, England, and Lutheran Germany were making Catholicism a crime, and Italy and Spain were making Protestantism a crime, Suleiman ordered the release of a Christian prisoner, “not wishing to bring any man from his religion by force.”51 He made a safe home in his empire for Jews fleeing from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal.
His defects appeared more clearly in his family relations than in his government. All are agreed that despite wars—which he excused as defense by offense—he was a man of refined and kindly sentiment, generous, humane, and just.52 His people not only admired him, they loved him. When, on Friday, he went to the mosque, they observed complete silence while he passed; he bowed to them all—Christians and Jews and Mohammedans—and then prayed for two hours in the temple. We do not hear, in his case, of that addiction to the harem which was to undermine the health and power of some later sultans. But we do find him so susceptible to the passions of love as to forget prudence, justice, and even parental affection.
In the earlier years of his reign his favorite mistress was a Circassian slave known as “The Rose of Spring,” marked by that dark and chisled beauty which for centuries has characterized the women of the regions around the eastern end of the Black Sea. She bore him a son, Mustafa, who grew into a handsome, able, and popular youth. Suleiman entrusted him with important offices and missions, and trained him to merit as well as inherit the throne. But in the course of love Khurrem—“The Laughing One”—a Russian captive whom the West called Roxelana, won the Sultan away from the Circassian; and her beauty, gaiety, and wiles kept hi
m enchanted till tragedy was consummated. Overriding the rule of his recent predecessors, Suleiman made Khurrem his wife (1534), and he rejoiced in the sons and daughters that she gave him. But as he aged, and the prospect of Mustafa’s accession loomed, Khurrem dreaded the fate of her sons, who might legitimately be killed by the new sultan. She succeeded in marrying her daughter to Rustem Pasha, who in 1544 became Grand Vizier; and through this wife Rustem was brought to share Khurrem’s fear of Mustafa’s coming power.
Meanwhile Mustafa had been sent to govern Diyarbekir, and had distinguished himself by his valor, tact, and generosity. Khurrem used his virtues to destroy him; she insinuated to Suleiman that Mustafa was courting popularity with a view to seizing the throne. Rustem charged that the youth was secretly wooing the Janissaries to his cause. The harassed Sultan, now fifty-nine, doubted, doubted, wondered, believed. He went in person to Eregli, summoned Mustafa to his tent, and had him killed as soon as he appeared (1553). Khurrem and Rustem then found it simple to induce the Sultan to have Mustafa’s son slain, lest the youth should seek revenge. Khurhem’s son Selim was made prince and heir, and she died content (1558). But Selim’s brother Bajazet, seeing assassination as his fate, raised an army to challenge Selim; civil war raged; Bajazet, defeated, fled to Persia (1559); Shah Tamasp, for 300,000 ducats from Suleiman and 100,000 from Selim, surrendered the contender; Bajazet was strangled (1561), and his five sons were put to death for social secùrity. The ailing Sultan, we are told, thanked Allah that all these troublesome offspring were departed, and that he could now live in peace.53
But he found peace boring. He brooded over the news that the Knights whom he had ousted from Rhodes were strong in Malta, and were rivaling the Algerian pirates with their own rapacious sorties. If Malta could be made Moslem, mused the seventy-one-year-old Sultan, the Mediterranean would be safe for Islam. In April 1564, he sent a fleet of 150 ships, with 20,000 men, to seize the strategic isle. The Knights, skillfully led by the resourceful Jean de la Valette, fought with their wonted bravery; the Turks captured the fort of St. Elmo by sacrificing 6,000 men, but they took nothing else; and the arrival of a Spanish army compelled them to raise the siege.
