LORDS OF THE HORIZONS
Jason Goodwin is an award-winning travel writer and historian. His first book, The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through India and China in Search of Tea, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Awards, 1991, and his second, On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul, was the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, 1993. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed detective series set in 1840s Istanbul and featuring Yashim the Eunuch. He lives in Dorset with his wife and four children.
ALSO BY JASON GOODWIN
Fiction
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The Snake Stone
The Bellini Card
An Evil Eye
Non-fiction
The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through India and China in Search of Tea
On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul
JASON GOODWIN
Lords of the Horizons
A History of the Ottoman Empire
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
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Published by Vintage 1999
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1998
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Contents
Map of the Ottoman Empire
Introduction
Prologue
Part I
Curves and Arabesques
1. Origins
2. The Balkans
3. Thunderbolt
4. The Siege
5. The Centre
6. The Palace
7. War
8. Suleyman the Magnificent
9. Order
10. Cities
11. The Sea
12. Rhythms
Part II
The Turkish Time
13. The Turkish Time
14. Stalemate
15. The Cage
16. The Spiral
17. The Empire
Part III
Hoards
18. Hoards
19. Koprulu and Vienna
20. Austria and Russia
21. Ayan
22. Shamming
23. Borderlands
24. The Auspicious Event
25. The Bankrupt
Epilogue
Ottoman Sultans
An Ottoman Chronology
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
These songs will not be to everyone’s taste, for there is little variation among them, all of them containing the same words, such as: hero, knight, horseman, galley slave, serpent, dragon, wolf, lion, falcon, eagle, falcon’s nest and sword, sabres, lances, Kraljevic, Kobilic, Zdrinovic, necklets, medallions, decrees, heads chopped off, slaves carried away, etc. May those who find them pleasing sing them; may those who do not, go off to sleep.
Andrija Kacic-Miosic,
The Pleasant Conversation
of the Slavic People,
Venice, 1756
Introduction
In the Spring of 1990, when the politics of eastern Europe and the certainties of Soviet communism were overthrown, I made my first journey to Istanbul, on foot. We walked twenty miles or so a day, and at night we bedded down in friendly farmers’ hay-barns, or under feathered quilts.
From the Baltic we tramped to the faded drumbeat of recessive empires, German or Russian, that had scoured the country like opposing tides. The Habsburgs cast long shadows, too: those ‘little kings of Vienna’ as the Ottoman sultan Süleyman once styled them.
In Eger, a town in Hungary above the Alfold, or Desolate Plain, on which Ottoman and Habsburg armies clashed so frequently and inconclusively in the 17th century, we saw a lonely minaret rising above a dusty town square. Long ago this was the northern most minaret in Europe. Shorn of its mosque, it marked the high-tide mark of Ottoman conquest, in this small city of vegetable plots and cool, dark cellars in which the people of Eger liked to store their wine.
From Eger, crossing the flat plains of eastern Hungary, into the hills of Transylvania, and over the rampart of the Carpathian mountains, we found ourselves moving to a different beat. The rhythms of music changed; tea became coffee, black and oily; the Calvinist and Catholic churches of the Hungarians – which sheltered us for many weeks – were interlaced with the rounded mushroom outcroppings of the Orthodox, their icons and their painted walls. Perhaps the gypsies did it best, with their coloured prints and skirts and arrhythmic clapping and sudden improvisations; or the semi-nomads we encountered on the mountain ranges, in rain-capes of fantastic design; or the sudden proliferation of hats – hats tall, round, brimless, dented, felt. Or was it – in Romania and Bulgaria – an impulse to trade, to conceal, to engage?
I think we caught Europe at a moment of clarity, and what we saw was a world that slanted towards Istanbul.
This book was triggered by that experience.
The pages which follow are broadly but not wholly chronological. I’ve woven narratives – on the seizure of Constantinople, say, or the career of Süleyman the Magnificent, or the assault on Vienna in 1683 – between chapters that focus on significant aspects of the empire’s administration. How did the Ottomans fight? How did they go to sea? What were the rhythms of life within the Empire, the bass notes of an imperial settlement that reached from the Pyramids to the steppe? Elsewhere I’ve tried to picture the empire at different epochs in its long history, drawing on a mass of contemporary observation and anecdote.
Prologue
At the back of the Bayezit Mosque in Istanbul, close to the walls of the Great Bazaar, stand the ruins of an old Byzantine chapel. Beneath its vaulted roof is a tumbledown café. Horn lanterns hanging from the wall cast a dim light on the clientele, while the open door affords a glimpse – beyond the gigantic cypress which grows in the courtyard of the Bayezit Mosque, past the porphyry columns – into the sanctuary of the mosque itself, where the faithful kneel in prayer.
In the café a little orchestra – flute, two drums, a viola and a triangle – is playing in one corner; a backlit sheet is stretched across another. Armchairs are taken by several elderly pashas, some in uniform, some in Stamboulines and fezzes, all of them supporting armfuls of grandchildren. Behind them sit a handful of solemn old m
en in turbans, smoking pipes; a clutch of Greek and Armenian women, swathed to invisibility in black shawls; and a couple of Cook’s tourists, in tweeds, hoping for an insight.
For in a moment Karagoz and Hacivat will skitter across the sheet, heroes of the shadow play, the Pantaloon and Harlequin of the Ottoman stage: jointed silhouettes, cut from dried camel leather, painted up and oiled for translucency. The original Karagoz, hunchbacked and foul-mouthed, and his straight man, Hacivat, are supposed to have developed their knockabout routines on a building site in 1396, where their antics proved so irresistible that work on Sultan Bayezit’s Great Mosque in Bursa ground to a halt, and the Sultan had them put to death. Others say Constantinople (Istanbul) always had its Karagoz and Hacivat, even in the days of the Roman emperors. Some think that the pair of them are offshoots of an ancient wisdom, dressed in a corrupted version of the licensed finery of the Sufi and the shaman and the bard.
The Bayezit Mosque
In the semi-ruinous café they are worked by an Armenian, who is a mimic and comedian rolled up in a newspaper – a five-, six-, even seven-tasselled puppeteer. His is a very old, wandering profession. Over the years he has been in Hungary, setting garrisons in a roar, or in Egypt, raising a pasha’s smile; he has carried his cut-outs, lamp and little screen to Iraq and the Crimea; to the neighbourhood of Venice in the army’s van, and with the fleets to Algiers. The Cook’s tourists have been told to watch for his scurrilous take-off of a foreigner speaking Turkish. The orchestra wails and squeaks; the Armenian ladies giggle; the children squirm; and a constant supply of coffee cups moves about the room, borne by Circassian youths in ‘the good old costume’: which is baggy trousers, waistcoats, and coils of coloured linen piled on their shaven heads.
This book is about a people who do not exist. The word ‘Ottoman’ does not describe a place. Nobody nowadays speaks their language. Only a few professors can begin to understand their poetry – ‘We have no classics,’ snapped a Turkish poet in 1964 at a poetry symposium in Sofia, when asked to acquaint the group with examples of classical Ottoman verse.
For six hundred years the Ottoman Empire swelled and declined. It advanced from a dusty beylik in the foothills of Anatolia at the start of the fourteenth century to conquer the relics and successors of Byzantium, including the entire Balkan peninsula from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the so-called Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia north of the Danube. It took Anatolia. The submission of the Crimean Tartars in the fifteenth century, along with the capture of Constantinople in 1453, completed its control of the Black Sea. In 1517 it swept up the heartlands of Islam – Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, along with the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Controlling the thoroughfares which linked Europe to the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Danube to the Nile.
The empire in those years was Islamic, martial, civilised and tolerant. To those who lived outside its boundaries, in lands known, by Islamic custom, as Dar ul-Harb, ‘Abode of War’, it was an irritant and a terror. To its own subject peoples, however, it belonged in the Dar ul-Islam, or ‘Abode of Peace’, and was such a prodigy of pep, so vigorous and so well-ordered, such a miracle of human ingenuity, that contemporaries felt it was helped into being by powers not quite human – diabolical or divine, depending on their point of view.
But at the start of the seventeenth century the Ottomans faltered. The Mediterranean Sea was relegated to second-division status, the Islamic spirit seemed to stagnate. The nations of the West were querulous and disunited, but their very squabbles proved vigorous and progressive. In the Ottoman, Islamic world the battles were already won, the arguments suppressed; the law was written, and the Ottomans cleaved ever more rigidly to the past in a spirit of narcissistic pride.
For the next three hundred years, the empire defied prognostications of its imminent collapse. Fractious and ramshackle, its politics riddled with corruption, its purposes furred by sloth, it was a miracle of a kind, too, a prodigy of decay. ‘It has become like an old body, crazed through with many vices, which remain when the youth and strength is decayed,’ wrote Sir Thomas Roe in 1621. The crazed old body survived him by almost three centuries; outlived its fiercest enemies, the Russian Tsar, and the Habsburg Emperor, by a full four years. Not until 1878 were the Ottomans dislodged from Bosnia; not until 1882 did the Sultan cease to rule, in title anyway, over Egypt. Albania, on the Adriatic coast, was one of the toughest provinces the Ottomans ever sought to subdue in the fifteenth century; but the Albanians were still sending parliamentary deputies to Constantinople in 1909.
This was an Islamic empire, though many of its subjects were not Muslim, and it made no effort to convert them. It controlled the thoroughfares between East and West, but it was not very interested in trade. It was, by common consent, a Turkish empire, but most of its dignitaries and officers, and its shock troops, too, were Balkan Slavs. Its ceremonial was Byzantine, its dignity Persian, its wealth Egyptian, its letters Arabic. The Ottomans were not accounted builders by contemporaries – even though one grim old Grand Vizier was remembered as the man who built more churches than Justinian. They came with no schemes of agricultural improvement, although production soared in the lands they conquered in Europe. They were not religious fanatics as a rule; Sunni Muslims, they followed the moderate Hanefi school of Koranic interpretation. Sultans read the life of Alexander, but they were not particularly interested in the past.* But the young Ivan the Terrible took the life of Mehmet the Conqueror as his primer, and the Venetians, who always liked to know the way things ran, fiercely admired the system of government which Mehmet had devised, and found in it a Palladian quality, of harmony and handsome proportion.
The empire outlived its grandeur, famously. By the time Napoleon landed in Egypt the empire seemed to the world as weak as Spain, as decayed in ancient pomp as Venice. Rich in talents still, the empire no longer provided a glittering stage for their expression. Its most brilliant sailors were all Greek. Its canniest merchants were Armenian. Its soldiers were ineptly led, while everywhere admired for their courage. Imperial statesmen operated at home in an atmosphere of intolerable suspicion. Yet the empire lingered into the twentieth century with no white cliffs to shield it, like England; no single language to unite it, like France. Unlike Spain, the empire was wedded to no illusions of religious purity; and it never discovered gold, or Atlantic trade, or steam. The Ottomans seemed to stand, in their final years, for negotiation over decision, for tradition over innovation, and for a dry understanding of the world’s ways over all that was thrusting and progressive about the western world.
Never, perhaps, did a power fall so low, in such a glare of publicity – the Crimean War of 1856, in which Turkey fought Russia with French and British aid, was the first war in history covered by journalists. Tsar Alexander called the Ottoman Empire ‘the Sick Man of Europe’. The Victorians referred to it impersonally as ‘the Eastern Question’, to which an answer, by implication, was to be supplied by muscular Christian gentlemen. To many westerners, of course, what was no longer an object of fear became an object of curiosity, and even admiration: certainly no one could deny the beauty of a traditional society, and painters found a ready market for their depictions of Levantine life. In the nineteenth century the empire made a valiant attempt to remodel itself along western lines, to enjoy, as everyone hoped, some of the western magic; but the convulsion killed it, for by then the heart was weak.
Karagoz is put in a coffin and buried at the end of the play, but just before the light goes out he pushes up the lid, hops out and sits on the coffin, roaring with laughter. The Armenian puppeteer puts out his lamp. The little orchestra, after a timpanic crescendo, lay down their instruments. The Circassian boys who have been handing refreshments round now pass amongst the audience for coins, and the pashas’ little girls, who have giggled through some improper dialogue, wriggle out.
The grave old master behind all the moves and bustle of that prodigious performance known as the Ottoman
Empire moves on, packs up his puppets, extinguishes his lamp, and leaves only the screen behind: the hills, plains and declivities of the Balkans, the plateaux and coasts of Anatolia, the Holy Cities Mecca and Medina, the sands of Egypt, the grasslands of Hungary, and the grey, grey waters of the Bosphorus, which slap at the pilings of the Galata bridge.
* Posterity concerned them, of course. Abdi was Sultan Mehmet IV’s court historian (1648–87). ‘The Sultan kept him always near his person, and charged him with the special duty of writing the annals of his reign. One evening Mahomet [i.e. Mehmet] asked of him, “What hast thou written to-day?” Abdi incautiously answered that nothing sufficiently remarkable to write about had happened that day. The Sultan darted a hunting-spear at the unobservant companion of royalty, wounded him sharply, and exclaimed, “Now thou hast something to write about” ’ (Creasy).
1
Origins
The great Eurasian steppe is a region of scrub and feathery grasses which stretches from the borders of China to the shore of the Black Sea. To the north, it gives way to conifer forests and permafrost; south, it is belted generally by deserts. Steppe grass is too tough, and the weather too variable for cultivation. There is little running water to speak of, and in the last fifty years, since the Soviets brought in machinery to plough the steppe, the rivers have begun running dry, so that the Caspian Sea – landlocked, enormous, a watery reflection of the dry steppe itself – has started to recede.
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