Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The army bivouacked for five months every year, and the excellent order of their camp not only delivered them fresh to the battlefield, but also served as a sort of collapsible castle, for it was a cat’s cradle of guy-ropes pegged out everywhere, protecting the camp from a sudden assault. An early witness thought that the Ottomans ‘lodge more grandly in the field than at home’, while their tents – red or yellow for high officials, purple for the Grand Vizier – reflects the evanescence of power amongst those who were the Sultan’s slaves. The circumference of the Grand Vizier’s own tent, the traveller della Valle said, was half a mile; before it lay a vast piazza, much resembling the palace courts, and you entered by way of a ‘large, tented rotunda, high pitched, under whose shade stayed the servants and other retainers’; the piazza itself was screened by a circle of green tents – the better, della Valle thought, to camouflage themselves in grass. Internal columns were painted red and hung with imitation lamps. The covered way was spread with huge carpets; thronged with persons of the lesser quality, squatting at the edges, who would all rise and salute a dignitary, in utter silence. From the inner pavilion, you glimpsed other tents making apartments, all of gold-embroidered silk. Even stables were erected in canvas – with ‘all the conveniences a great palace can possess’.

  A cavalry perk was the right to sell off worn-out tents. When the janissaries, slumped in barracks in Istanbul, wanted to signal their dissatisfaction, they overturned their cauldrons and refused the Sultan’s food; but on campaign, mutiny was declared when the ropes of the commander’s tent were cut, and gorgeous satins fluttered in the mud.

  The Venetian Morosini, with scant desire to admire the empire, grudgingly confessed that their system allowed the Ottomans ‘to maintain armies larger than another ruler could have if he paid them ten and a half million gold ducats a year’. While western feudal rulers would be cajoling and threatening their vassals, pleading with over-mighty magnates, perhaps, or the citizens of free towns, or frantically raising loans to raise troops, the Ottoman armies would be assembling like clockwork, paid up and signed on. ‘They never show the least concern for their lives in battle, and they can live a long time without bread or wine, content with barley and water’, the sort of food a western soldier would give to his horse. Their camels gave them a great advantage over western armies, too, in carrying war to the enemy, for a camel could carry 250 kilos, twice as much as a horse; only one in every four, not one in two, was required to carry the beasts’ own fodder.

  The Ottomans carefully analysed the problems of war. No source of intelligence was overlooked, and a well-developed spy network brought accurate assessments of enemy strength and movements, and of strategic entanglements which the Sultan’s forces might exploit. Each winter the last campaign would be subject to a minute post-mortem, with new techniques, tactics or weapons perhaps added to the Ottoman arsenal. Weaknesses would be noted, both in their own performance and in their enemies’ defences. Orders for the next campaign were already out – 30,000 camels from the Maghreb, tunics from the Salonica cotton weavers – as governors along the line of march began to organise stockpiles of food, commanding the nomads to deliver their tax in the form of sheep, and setting the local villagers to mending roads and bridges in lieu of tax (although the army also had a corps whose job was to prepare the road; a corps to pitch the tents ahead; a corps to bake the bread). The reserve would be deployed to keep order in the rear, while the garrison men, the servants of the frontier, were stirred up to raids on the borders, to soften up the enemy while the main army was still on the march.

  Ottoman morale was splendidly high, for Ottoman society was sustained by hope, a very refreshing air, especially when expectations were so readily fulfilled. On 23 April – St George’s Day* – each year the palace itself got underway, and like a merchantman suddenly dropping concealed gun ports and running up the Jolly Roger, turned itself into a mobile fighting machine. The Halberdiers of the Tresses, whose long hair fell over their eyes like blinkers when they carried wood into the harem apartments, fanned out as foragers along the line of march. Palace tailors, shoemakers, doctors, holy men bundled up the tools of their trade, ready to unwrap them again at every camp. The dog handlers, the falconers, the gardeners and the oarsmen of the royal pinnace assembled under banners like the janissaries they really were, and prepared to march. The head gardener resumed his seasonal office of executioner, ready for any man infringing the fabled order of march. The learned pageboys whose task over the winter had been, perhaps, to keep a taper alight in the Sultan’s room at night, or to chant from the Koran, or dress the Sultan in the morning, sprang onto Arab steeds, snatched up their weapons and formed themselves in a troop around their lord. The pashas, the kadi askers of Rumelia and Anatolia, took to the saddle. The kadi of Istanbul prepared to take over the government of the city. The pasha of Erzerum led an army out into the plains, within striking distance of the borders, to maintain order. The fleet cruised in the Dardanelles. Somebody thrust the horsetails into the ground, and as they streamed in the Scutari wind, or at the Belgrade Gate, to signal the direction of the campaign, not only the governed but the entire government, too, set off; and everyone, everywhere, slipped into their position, as the empire prepared for the task it performed best, and apparently enjoyed the most – going to war.

  As that army marched into Europe up the old military road to Belgrade, it would be joined in perfect order by any number of special auxiliaries – Slav voynuk bands on horseback, inherited from the old Balkan rulers; professional marauders, mostly Christian, who also worked in garrisons and for the river fleet; taciturn derbendcis, who manned the straits and the mountain passes; mounted Vlach shepherds, a man for every five families in the hills. All along the marching route men sprang to, Christians mainly, mining, quarrying, towing boats, manufacturing arms and gunpowder, coming to swell an army of perhaps 100,000 men; and still others might pour down from the north to join up, Tartars from the Crimea, the vassal troops of Wallachia and Moldavia, the mustachioed warriors of Transylvania. They came at a whistle, and for free, while the enemy would be scrabbling for funds, and beseeching its men at arms to fight. ‘It would seem a great Clog to the Gran Signor to be obliged to depend on the bounty of his Subjects, when he would make a War,’ said Rycaut.

  The beylerbeyi

  It was a sight to see, and few foreigners passed up the chance to witness the cavalcade pass out of the city. Della Valle saw them go in 1615, preceded by flags, yellow and red, borne on lances; chaushes on horseback, two by two; gunners, in pairs, with arquebuses and scimitars. Then came a body of infantry carrying wooden weapons, the insignia, della Valle thought, of government and justice, followed by the spahis of Rumelia, with bows and arrows but no lances, since they were not detailed to participate in this campaign, swathed in animal skins like Greek heroes.

  Behind them marched the trainee janissaries and their aga, or commander, a white eunuch who went on foot. Then came all the janissary banners, followed by mounted janissary captains. The janissaries themselves, marching out of line in a dense pack, took a long time passing.* ‘They had no defensive arms of any sort, and no weapons of attack save for scimitars, arquebuses, and some little hatchets or spades at their wrists … for digging the ground and cutting wood rather than for fighting: yet arms to be respected for their use in assailing and storming cities.’

  The cavalcade acknowledged the watching crowd with a display of wooden weapons, wooden artillery, little galleys stuffed with dolls in western hats, huge globes with hatchets suspended significantly over them, a camel, and a large number of footmen shouting praises to the pasha and army. The aga of the janissaries came accompanied by four big furled flags and companies of dervishes, all singing and leaping and whirling, followed by the green flag of the emirs, attended by green turbaned emirs without weapons and on horseback. The kadis, or Islamic judges, of Constantinople, rode past, and the six chief porters of the palace. Next came the royal standards, three with a horsetail, more b
anners, the flag of the Prophet, green and ‘odd shaped’ – then the Grand Vizier’s horses, all caparisoned to the ground, attended by pageboys in matching livery, some leading, some riding, with bows and arrows and chain-mail coats under their clothes, mail on their heads too, and a little hat. Then legal dignitaries. Then the viziers who, with the Grand Vizier, made up the Sultan’s council, the divan. Then the Chief White Eunuch, who controlled the palace officials and who, as the Grand Vizier’s deputy in his absence, had on this occasion engineered the Grand Vizier’s departure in the first place. With him was the highest Islamic dignitary, the Mufti, ‘the finest looking man with the most splendid and venerable beard I have ever seen in my life,’ della Valle recalled, adding that ‘by a man’s presence and his beard’ the Turks ‘tend to deduce his valour and brains’.

  Surrounded by footsoldiers, the Grand Vizier himself, with his heron plume on his turban, smiling and bowing to right and left (a privilege reserved to himself and the Sultan) was pursued by further squadrons of spahis with unhilted lances like spears, bows and arrows and, for some, light mail coats. Behind them rode the Grand Vizier’s cavalry, in the same gear but bearing different pennants, and wearing mail coats and helmets without visors, golden stirrups, and carrying bucklers, on horses decked to the ground in cloth of gold. This, our witness thought, had been the most attractive display of all, as the whole army embarked, amid salvoes, for Asia.

  It seemed like the grandest caravan in the world, bound to reap surefire profits from the far corners of the empire, to return laden with booty in the autumn. When the Sultan himself rode out, he was surrounded by his household cavalry, the men stationed on his right flank all left handed, to draw their arrows from the quiver like a mirror image of the squadron on his left. At their back, on the march, came a vast troop of beasts of burden: thousands of horses; thousands of camels led by muffled Bedouin; buffaloes pulling the heavy cannon; and already the janissaries had begun letting their beards grow, to show their hardness.

  In the van of the army rode a mob of volunteers, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust, prepared to live on what they could pillage in enemy territory and hoping to be rewarded for their skill by promotion to the ranks – in one terrible assault, so Rycaut tells us, a single timar was awarded, and re-awarded, eight times. Mostly from Anatolia, their service, which was free, was indispensable to a good campaign, for these akinci bands roamed far and wide, showing themselves in Styria, in Saxony and Bavaria; some reached the Rhine and burnt crops; and their presence in the enemy’s rear – torching a soldier’s farm, cutting an army’s lines – was very demoralising.

  In pitched battle, as in sieges, these cannon fodder proved their worth, flying at the enemy like dust, battering defences with their bare hands, sapping the enemy’s strength long before real battle commenced. At Belgrade, the janissaries stormed the walls over a moat filled up by dead akinci. Again and again, attacking and then wheeling in apparent flight, they lured their over-eager opponents into traps.

  Hungary’s effort to contain the Turks on the lower Danube had failed at Nicopolis in 1396; but only Hungary could hope to check the Turks in Central Europe. In recognition of the fact the Serbs handed them Belgrade in 1426, to be the centrepiece of a southern defence line. For a century, Hungary was in constant dynastic alliance with Bohemia, Poland or Austria; but the costs of defence could not so easily be spread, and even though the brilliant general Hunyadi saved Belgrade in 1456 and came within an ace of marching on Edirne in 1451, he was always fatally strapped for cash and arms. His son Matthias, who became King of Hungary in 1456, was at best able to organise a coherent system of home defence.

  The Ottomans, by then, were rolling the Balkans up. Serbia was incorporated in 1459; Bosnia in 1463. The Peloponnese fell in 1460. Albania succumbed after the death of her heroic warrior Scanderbeg in 1468. Moldavia followed Wallachia, and became a fee-paying vassal of the Sultan in 1455: neither of these storehouses of grain, timber, honey and furs could defend itself against the Turks, who occupied Wallachia’s Danube frontier in the late fourteenth century, Moldavia’s less than a century later. Against both they could unleash at will the terrible fury of the Crimean Tartars, whose khan had become a vassal of the empire in 1475.

  With Hungary struggling to defend herself – Smederovo and Galamboc on the Hungarian frontier were taken by the Turks in 1439 – the physical occupation of the Danubian Principalities seemed unnecessary. Their rulers became Ottoman vassals and, much later, appointees.

  By the end of the fifteenth century the Ottomans had brought their dominion to a comfortable point: their borders lapping against Hungary on the middle Danube, against the steppe in the north, against Iran and the Arab states in the Middle East. It was this latter region which held out the fattest promise: take Arabia, even Egypt, and the Ottoman monopoly over trade routes from the East into the Mediterranean world would be complete.

  So it was that in 1514 this brave Ottoman troop turned east. The horsetails were planted on the Scutari shore, and the cannon and chains which protected the camp from cavalry attack were rumbled forward. Within three years Sultan Selim (1511–21), known to history as Selim the Grim, had made himself master of Iran, Iraq and Egypt, the heartlands of his faith, and the Sherif of Mecca handed him the keys to the holiest city of Islam.

  * Sir Paul Rycaut (1628–1700) was an English factor, or merchant, in Smyrna, much liked and respected by almost everyone who met him. He wrote several books on the empire and its religions. His History was issued in 1679, as a follow-up to Knolles’s History of the Turkes of 1604 – Rycault regretted seeing his work ‘Crouded into 50 sheetes, and to become an appendix to an old Obscure author’; but the book was well received throughout Europe. He later traded in Hamburg, from where he introduced the duvet to England.

  * The lure of booty cannot be overestimated: Hungary lost whole trees and even flowers, stolen not destroyed.

  * The Turks were amused to see St George represented in Greek churches: they thought of him as their own.

  * Marching in step went out with the Roman road, and returned with tarmacadam.

  8

  Suleyman the Magnificent

  On 18 July 1520, Sultan Selim left Constantinople to join his army assembling near Edirne, a hundred miles to the west. All Selim’s campaigns to date had been into Persia, and Arabia, and Egypt; but for the first time in his eight-year reign the horsetails stood at the Edirne Gate; old symbols of Turkish authority, they announced to the world, and the mustering troops, that the pride of Ottoman arms was moving west, towards Europe. Only halfway to Edirne, on 21 September, Selim died, a chronicler wrote, ‘of an infected boil, and thereby Hungary was spared’.

  The traditions which governed Ottoman succession moved smoothly into operation. Selim’s Grand Vizier kept the news of his master’s death secret in the camp, while the fastest messenger service in the world carried word to Selim’s only son, Suleyman, currently acting as military governor of Manisa across the Dardanelles. Because Suleyman had no brothers, on this occasion the empire would escape the conflict which usually marred Ottoman succession by the implementation of the law of fratricide.

  Suleyman, then twenty-six years old, reached Constantinople on Sunday 30 September, within eight days of his father’s death. There he was escorted to the mosque and tomb at Eyup, on the upper reaches of the Golden Horn, outside the city walls. To Ottoman believers, this was the third holiest site in the world, after Mecca and Jerusalem, the spot where Eyup Ensari, the Prophet’s friend and standard bearer, had been buried during the first Arab siege of Constantinople, which took place between AD 674 and 678. The siege had failed, the burial site was lost, and Constantinople remained in Christian hands for another eight centuries; but during the successful Ottoman siege of the city in 1453 Eyup’s tomb was miraculously rediscovered, and Mehmet the Conqueror had a kulliye, or mosque complex, erected there. After his own death, it became the custom for all succeeding sultans to be girded with the sword of their illustrious anc
estor, Osman Gazi, at Eyup’s tomb, and then to visit the tomb of the Conqueror himself, in the great kulliye* he had built in the middle of Constantinople, over the old Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles.

  At dawn the following day – Monday 1 October 1520 – he received the homage of the high officials at the gate of the third court, in the Topkapi Palace. In the afternoon he met his father’s funeral procession at the Edirne Gate, and escorted the body to its burial place: his first official decree was to order the erection of a kulliye in Selim’s honour. Two days later he distributed the now customary donative, or bakshish, to the Janissary Corps: a larger sum, it was noted, than his father had thought necessary to give them eight years before. He also gave money to the other household troops, and various palace functionaries. To demonstrate his own regard for mercy and justice he decreed that some Cairene intellectuals Selim had brought to Constantinople by force should be allowed home; a boycott of Iranian goods was lifted, with compensation; and a few persistent evildoers were executed.

  ‘He is tall, but wiry, and of a delicate complexion. His neck is a little too long, his face thin, and his nose aquiline … a pleasant mien, though his skin tends to pallor. He is said to be a wise lord, fond of study, and all men hope for good from his rule.’ So Bernardo Contarini summed up the new Sultan at his accession. Selim’s conquests had given Europe a breathing space of some twenty years. ‘A gentle lamb had succeeded a fierce lion,’ Jovius wrote, while Pope Leo X had prayers sung all over Rome.

  While the earliest Ottoman sultans had been dubbed ‘Gran Turco’ by the Italian city-states, later, as their prestige and power grew, they were referred to as ‘Gran Signor’. For Suleyman the West reserved its highest commendation. Suleyman the Magnificent signed himself ruler of thirty-seven kingdoms, lord of