Ottoman official
They gave up everything to reach the pinnacle of power; but like the janissary who for all the collegiate self-abnegation of his life still strutted through the streets of Istanbul, they knew they were the best. A miracle had pulled them, as it seemed, through an invisible door in the Balkan pasturelands.* The training which they received, and the rigorous selection procedure which they had surmounted to reach the top, must have left them with a grandeur of purpose and a breadth of view without parallel in any ruling group in history; observers liked to call them ‘wide awake’. Theirs was pride of the most splendid and forgivable sort; for they were fitted to rule. The western baron knew his region, of course, but his talents depended on the lottery of birth; and the Kapikulu had not only studied the arts of government, he knew his people intimately. He often retained a sympathy for the humble. In 1599 a rough peasant with a grievance approached the Grand Vizier’s office, in his skins and sandals, with a live ewe hefted over his shoulder: he arrived just when an embassy from the Holy Roman Empire was preparing to negotiate a cessation of hostilities; and he walked right in, ahead of them all.
Through his slaves the Sultan’s power was transfused throughout the empire. They were the Sultan’s eyes and ears and hands – the word vizier meant ‘the Sultan’s foot’ – and when they had risen far, close to riches and the strangler’s bowstring, even their deaths were encompassed in the active mood: ‘Whereas for such or such Facts thou deservest to die, it is our pleasure that … thou deliver thy Head to this our Messenger,’ the Kapikulu was told, as he might have been asked to fetch the Sultan’s slippers or subdue a province in happier times. There were occasionally muffled scuffles, and at least one vizier, when the chaush, or imperial equerry, reached him in his Cypriot exile, died of fright before the cord touched him; while Elias Haneschi sketches a lurid picture of a resistant pasha – ‘the executioner, who has made himself expert at his office, in throwing up apples into the air, and cutting them in halves as they descend, aims at the neck as well as he can, but missing his mark, makes dreadful havoc in destroying his victim.’ But most would respond with the same dignified obedience with which they carried out any of the Sultan’s commands. ‘Then I must die?’ said Kara Mustafa. ‘So be it.’ He washed his hands, and bared his own neck, and when the silken cord had finished him off, his head was struck from his shoulders, and duly sent to the palace in a velvet bag.
In 1524, shortly before Sultan Suleyman launched his brilliant and successful assault on the island of Rhodes, the supposedly impregnable bastion of the crusading Order of the Knights of St John, his attention was caught by a page at his court. A year older than Suleyman, Ibrahim was the son of a Greek sailor. Captured by pirates as a boy, sold to a widow of Magnesia, educated by her and seconded to the Sultan’s retinue, this handsome and quick-witted young man grew up speaking Turkish, Persian, Greek and Italian, playing the viol, and reading histories and romances. He was a foil to the young Sultan, who made him Grand Vizier in a skip and a jump.
Ibrahim worked hard. Suleyman accorded him the insignia of high authority: six horsetails, to his own seven and the four traditionally given to grand viziers. The two young men became inseparable. They campaigned together, ate together, even shared a tent. In 1523 the governor of Egypt, who had been expecting the post that Ibrahim took, rebelled. Ibrahim was dispatched to pacify the province, doing it so well, so carefully weighing his checks and his balances, so skilfully marshalling the vast resources of this country that Egypt remained quiet for a century and a half, and the system was applied in later years to almost any province that would bear it. He weighed janissary garrisons against their treasury paymasters, and Ottoman governors against muftis; he saw to it that commanders and treasurers were appointed by, and reported to, Istanbul, and enacted laws ensuring that, while Mamelukes might hold office, they might hold it anywhere but in Egypt. He made the most prudent fiscal arrangements, whereby the whole revenue of the state was collected, not by this man and that, but by tax farmers, with fixed sums to produce, and the rest their profit. On his return in 1524 he married the Sultan’s sister, and six years later, after Suleyman had thrown a party for the circumcision of his sons, he asked Ibrahim which ceremony had been more magnificent, Ibrahim’s wedding or this. ‘My wedding,’ Ibrahim retorted smartly. ‘Your Majesty had no guest equal to mine, for I was honoured by the presence of the Emperor of Mecca and Medina, the Solomon of our time.’
Poor Ibrahim! This line of talk between friends shows the way the wind was blowing. Ibrahim led a campaign into Persia, where he allowed the army to flounder through a land laid waste by the Shah’s tactical retreat until the situation was rescued by Suleyman in person. Westerners were subsequently astonished to hear Ibrahim declare that he was, in matters of negotiation, Sultan himself. One morning in March 1536, in his bedroom next to the Sultan’s own, Ibrahim was found dead. The bailio, or Venetian ambassador, of the day, Alvise Gritti, was unimpressed. Ibrahim had forgotten, he said, that if the Sultan sent his cook to finish him off, nothing Ibrahim could do would prevent the killing.
* For which slippers an entire nation – albeit a very small one – paid a special poll tax, an event no Montenegrin could remember without shame centuries later.
* Istanbul, its popular Turkish name, may be a contraction of the Greek eis tin polis, ‘to the city’. This is the best of a number of feeble theories. Under the Ottomans the city remained Konstantiniyye on coins and documents.
* The curious white flap which janissaries wore on their hats commemorated the founder’s sleeve as he touched their heads in benediction.
* Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Flemish nobleman, wrote four superb Turkish Letters while on an ambassadorial mission to Constantinople between 1554 and 1562. A distinguished diplomat, he was also a botanist, a linguist, an antiquarian, a scholar and a zoologist, and his delightful letters, translated from Latin in 1927 by E. S. Forster, are among the best anecdotal sources of information on the empire in the sixteenth century. He also brought back the lilac, the tulip, the most famous of all Latin inscriptions, the Monumentum Ancyranum, 240 classical manuscripts and a great collection of old coins, as well as an irreplaceable Crim-Gothic vocabulary. He was always fresh, appreciative and funny. He died in 1592.
* In 1512 the first tribute was levied in Anatolia; the great architect Sinan was a product of that levy.
7
War
The Ottoman Empire lived for war. Every governor in this empire was a general; every policeman was a janissary; every mountain pass had its guards, and every road a military destination. The most willowy and doe-eyed pageboy was a dab hand with the gerit or the bow, and well versed in wrestling, the king of Ottoman sports. At the siege of Baghdad in 1683, when the Persians demanded the contest be decided by single combat, they put up a Herculean warrior from their ranks, and Sultan Mehmet IV took him on himself, splitting the Persian champion’s mailed head in two with a single blow. Even madmen had a regiment, the deli, or loons, Riskers of their Souls, who were used, since they did not object, as human battering rams, or human bridges (and in the eighteenth century another regiment, ‘the lost children’, took their place). Outbreaks of peace caused trouble at home, as men clamoured for the profit and the glory. Georgius de Hungaria was one of the first westerners to observe the Ottoman army at first hand; he was captured by them in 1438 and remained among them twenty years.
When recruiting for the army is begun, they gather with such readiness and speed you might think they are invited to a wedding and not to war. They gather within a month in the order they are summoned, the infantrymen separately from the calvarymen, all of them with their appointed chiefs, in the same order which they use at encampments and when preparing for battle … with such enthusiasm that men put themselves forward in place of their neighbours, and those left at home feel that an injustice has been done to them. They claim they will be happier if they die on the battlefield among the spears and arrows of the enemy than at ho
me among the tears and slavering of the old women. Those who die in war like this are not mourned but are hailed as saints and victors, to be set as an example and given high respect.
‘For this was I born, to bear arms,’ Bayezit had said; and when a Frenchman, Bertrand de la Brocquière, got a chance to review Mehmet II’s army in the field in 1462, he saw no reason why such a splendid troop should not conquer all Europe if it chose. In 1576 a Venetian witness echoed him, declaring that Christendom should fear a great extermination. ‘The empire’s forces are of two kinds,’ he added helpfully, ‘those of the land and those of the sea, and both are terrifying.’ The empire’s land forces were of two principal kinds, too, the light, fleet, patrician cavalrymen, and the stolid heavyweights of the infantry, each representing, perhaps, a particular strand of imperial virtue.
The janissaries formed the empire’s standing infantry, drawn from the boy tribute of the Balkans, with some of the strengths and limitations of the peasant, keeping their eyes on the soil, to capture ground, or hold it against fearsome odds. They dreamed of food in an earthy way, and so grumbling and insistent were their regimental bellies that they adopted titles of rank from the kitchen: their commanders were called soup-men, cooks, head scullions, water-carrier and Black Scullion. To lose the regimental standard in battle was disgraceful; but the loss of the regimental cauldron warranted the dismissal of all officers. A janissary strolling through the streets of Istanbul was a man of privilege, not rich but splendidly attired, and bearing himself with all the pride of a soldier who had earned his position in the world, with immunity from the common courts, like a peer of the realm. But no hearthside pleasures for him. From the crown of his pure white linen hat to the tips of his tough red boots he was a one-man fighting machine. The English ambassador once laughed at the little trowels hanging at their waists and said they looked more like diggers than soldiers; his wiser companion laughed too, and reminded him that ‘it was just with weapons of that sort, rather than with arquebuses and guns, that they had taken from the rest of us the strongholds of Rhodes, Agrigento, Chios and many other famous fortresses. Since there may be a hundred or more thousand men, all working together like that, with shovel and spade under the walls of a fortress, I cannot imagine what force or skill is able to defend it.’
The spahi, or cavalryman, was invariably a Muslim Turk, descended figuratively and literally from the old gazis. Give him his horse, hand him his bow, din in his ears his commander’s roar – ‘Come on, my wolves!’ – and you had, if not the first centaur to bear arms since the days of myth, then a man at any rate hard to tell apart from his horse (and swift, too, as a missile). Unhorsed, he could only stand helplessly by the campaign road, holding his saddle on his head, mutely imploring the charity of some great man to give him a new mount.
The spahis were scattered across the empire, always on the move, from billet to billet, from billet to the front. They retained to the end some of the wildness of the gazis. They wore skins. They practised by galloping at full tilt past a suspended brass ball and swivelling in the saddle to fire an arrow at it, like nomads of the steppe; and they came prancing and curvetting to the Edirne Gate, or the shores of Scutari, in answer to the horsetails’ summons. When a cavalryman was sentenced to death for allowing his horse to trample crops at the roadside, rider and mount were executed together.
It was every horseman’s dream to enrol in the permanent army with that billet or stipend known as a timar, to free him for the task of war. The sick, Rycaut* says, came to war on their beds, and infant timariots in their cradles. The timar was strictly a direct and convenient form of pay in return for military service, by which the timariot was entitled to collect a certain number of imperial taxes himself, according to his merits. The Ottoman Sultan owned all the land, and claimed all its taxes, but he lent some of its revenues directly to his men in return for service. A cavalryman might enjoy the revenues of a timar, a small village, say. A commander might be assigned a ziamet – the revenue perhaps of several small villages, and even a market. High provincial officials would be awarded their hass, compounded of various revenues from the region they governed in the Sultan’s name, potentially scattered across it, but generally the sort of revenues they could more conveniently reach, lodged in the city as they were – urban dues of various kinds, bridge tolls, market receipts, hearth taxes. All were expected to muster with a number of armed men, too: the timariot just one or two, the ziamet five or so, and the bey his whole household, pages, horsemen, slaves and all.
None were ever possessors of their land; never owner of the peasants; only the collectors, by appointment, of the precise dues to which they were entitled, whose value could be made up anywhere in the empire if they needed to be moved on. A timariot’s sons inherited nothing from him but the natural predisposition of the commanders to favour them by virtue of their father’s service; and the eldest son, when he was old enough, was generally granted a timar worth about a third as much as his father’s. When the frontier moved forward, the spahi might be moved forward with it; for signal valour he would be rewarded; but he remained through and through the Sultan’s man, and the wealth he disposed of remained the Sultan’s, too.
In each generation the resources of the empire would be surveyed. Taxes, tolls, every customary charge or grant of labour, all market dues, the value of lands, the wealth of villages were recorded for the construction and adjustment of the empire’s military fiefs, the timars. ‘Take a Turk from the saddle’, it has been said, ‘and he becomes a bureaucrat’; but every bureaucrat in the empire still felt, metaphorically at least, the saddle under him, and from the humblest copyist in the chancellery of the empire to the two highest judges in the land, the kadi askers – one for the troops of Anatolia, one for the soldiers of Rumelia – whosoever took the Sultan’s asper believed himself to be contributing to his military success.
From Buda to Baghdad the revenues of the empire were geared to endless predation upon the frontier, bringing booty for all,*new sources of tax, new timars for the men, and new pashaliks for the mighty, too. The Ottomans were the first state to maintain a standing army in Europe since Roman days, paid, fed, and unleashed through insurpassable feats of organisation. In 1683, when the Ottoman army marched up the Maritsa towards Vienna, 200,000 men on the move got fresh bread every evening; and in 1548, when they marched on the Persian Shah – hurried along, we are told, in case the local Shias infected them with heresy – they sprang upon the enemy with cannons charged and already ablaze, such contraptions, as they well knew, never having been seen by the Persians before; the entire army so well-provisioned, and the transport of all the necessities of life so carefully organised, that they had marched imperturbably for weeks through a landscape laid waste by the scorched-earth retreat of the Shah.
Western camps were babels of disorder, drunkenness and debauchery. The Ottoman camp was a tea party disturbed by nothing louder than the sound of mallet on tent peg, the camels’ cough, the bubbling of the cauldrons filled with rice. ‘I think there is no prince’, wrote the Byzantine chronicler Chalcocondyle, ‘who has his armies and camps in better order, both in abundance of victuals and in the beautiful order they use in encamping without any confusion or embarrassment.’ When an Italian traveller in the eighteenth century, the Comte de Marsigli, observed that the Ottomans still lay under the influence of their nomadic past, he was thinking principally of their tents. The Ottoman world was full of them. There were tents which gave shelter from desert sun, or Balkan rains. The Prophet had used a tent, and Sufi saints had pitched theirs in the sky. The real foundation of the empire came with Topkapi, or the casting of a tent in stone. The real power of the empire was its capacity to fling itself forward, so that at the last siege of Vienna, for example, it erected a canvas city beside the Austrian capital, but bigger than Vienna, and much better ordered, with neat rows of tented streets, and an orchard and garden for the Grand Vizier. ‘Ottoman order’, Tursun Bey called the army’s camp, when with miraculous spe
ed and enviable precision it was unfolded at the end of a day’s march, so that within an hour a whole city had risen up in the fields. The dusk was lit by the companiable fires of the janissary messes, and the approach to the royal tent was arranged with supplicants, messengers and officials exactly according to their degree. It dazzled Busbecq in the fifteenth century; and in the eighteenth, when the empire could seldom rattle a scimitar with conviction, it astonished Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who otherwise found militaria perfectly dull.
The bureaucracy of government was schematically represented by four tent poles: the Grand Vizier, the treasurers, the judges, and the chancellery; while every sultan ordered himself an accession tent, which took years to make, like the one of pure satin which Galland saw, pitched on the Hippodrome for everyone to admire, supported on sixteen poles, and richly embroidered with stylised foliage of red and green.
Lords of the Horizons Page 8
