Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  For the Ottomans knew the answer. Soon enough the Mahdi who was to usher in the end of the world would come, correct the prevalence of unbelief, and prove them right; until then it was enough to keep order, and patiently expand the Abode of Peace, holding the world in trust.

  For all their tolerance towards the habits and beliefs of people of the book, however, they loathed the Shias with an anxious passion, for the Shi’ite heresy threatened their complacent expectations. The followers of Ali tended to mysticism, in contrast to the worldly Sunni princes, and conventional authorities perceived them as a challenge. Selim the Grim was terrible to the Shi’ite kisilbas, literally ‘red-heads’, who wore red turbans and were seen as a danger to the state; he hunted them down in their thousands through eastern Anatolia. There was a general known simply as ‘the Butcher’, who massacred heretics wherever he met them, and whenever their core assumptions were challenged, whenever they felt truly frightened, the Ottomans seemed to lose control. Otherwise they could put up with a great deal. David Urquhart* in the 1830s once watched a little boy tormenting his janissary father in the porch of his house, astonished that for all the old soldier’s furious remonstrances he never lifted a finger in selfdefence. At last he asked the man why he didn’t just give the boy a beating.

  ‘Ah!’ said the soldier. ‘What clever people you Franks are!’

  The Ottomans waged war hard, but they governed their conquests with a light hand. The very nature of the territory they inherited made it vital that people looked after themselves: it was one thing to marshal armies at a whistle and send them thundering up the border roads, quite another to penetrate into every nook and cranny of this remarkably corrugated empire and attend to all that was going on.

  For all its glitter and martial energy, for all the riches which poured into Constantinople, the empire was pastoral at bottom. It was a land of mountains: the Pindus, the Carpathians; the impenetrable mountains of central Greece, Mount Olympus on the Peloponnese, the land of eagles itself, Albania. The name Balkan, meaning mountain, has grown to cover the whole region south of the Danube, in what was European Turkey; and geographers have never quite decided where one range of mountains ends and another one begins. Ottoman islands were often like Welsh bonnets, ports and settlers on the brim, herdsmen on the crown. In the east rose the Haemus, the Pontic and Taurus mountains of Anatolia, the jagged scree of Azerbaijan, the fastnesses of the Caucasus; and between the mountain pastures and the plains thousands of the empire’s subjects roamed according to the seasons, and lived a nomadic or half-nomadic life. It was an empire of seasonal movement, where the shepherds who climbed to the plateaux in summer would die if they stayed over the winter; where ships only set out after the Patriarch had blessed the waters in the spring, and would have foundered if they attempted the journey earlier. Between October and April, the mountains and the seas closed down, like the bazaars at night; and the empire half slept, like a hibernatory beast.

  Invisibility was the nomad’s natural defence. Sometimes settled people, for a quiet life, pretended not to see them. Sometimes they melted into the shadows, the rocks and trees. It was the business of the state to flush them out and make them settle down for the convenience of tax officials; but Ottoman nomadism was a sort of constant, more enduring than the clutter settlers could gather around themselves.

  The Ottomans had to recognise about thirty different tribal governments in the highlands of Armenia and Kurdistan. The old Gheg chieftains of northern Albania were semi-independent. The Yörük tribes who wandered in Anatolia dealt with the authorities on their own initiative. Some of them were Shi’ite, some were Sunni; often it was impossible to tell. They spoke a variety of Turkish dialects, identifying themselves by the flocks they tended, white sheep or black goats, or by a place of supposed origin. Their movements from summer to winter quarters and back again were carefully watched, and if they broke the rule against staying longer than three days anywhere on the route, or marauded, a special police guard was on hand to inflict immediate punishment.

  Yörüks were clannish and married amongst themselves, unless they stole a girl from a neighbouring tribe. (Marriage as a theft was practised by semi-nomads all through the empire, while among settled people it was generally a stylised feature of the marriage ceremony. The Crimean Tartar custom was for the bridal party to chase the groom and his retinue right up to his tent flap, whereupon her friends implored her not to dismount and his family begged her to get down and give them all presents.) The tinker who fixed the tackle and retinned the pots was paid collectively with cheese and butter. Every wife had her own tent, where she would spin, weave, churn; she might tend the camels, or the goats, or forage for fuel and water; and she invariaby went unveiled.

  The routes the Yörüks took were marked by the graves of their fellows and forebears, generally under some sacred tree; and as they passed they would throw a few stones on the grave, and tie rags and wooden spoons in the branches.

  Against this order in motion, the gypsies were noted for dancing bears, for telling fortunes, for potions, and singing at weddings, for metalwork and horses, and they never seemed very subdued by the grave decorum of their wandering cousins. Nobody ever really knew very much about them; they were despised everywhere, and the cruellest thing that anyone could do was to lock a gypsy up in gaol.

  As for the Vlachs, those Balkan shepherds who moved on foot, struck their goathair tents in the noonday sun, and spoke a Latin dialect like Romanian which inspired the romantic notion of their descent from Trajan’s lost legionaries, they were Christian Orthodox, and the Ottomans employed them, now and then, to guard the passes and spy on enemy movements; but as often as not they passed easily from side to side, treating the border with contempt. ‘Vlach’ means a stranger. They ranged the hills, fierce men with their woven rain capes and their shaggy mastiffs, moving from one settlement to the next, buying and selling a little as they went, so that the Greeks maintained that five Vlachs made a market – and sneered at them too, for being so landlubberly that the very word ‘Vlach’ came to signify, in Greek, a man who had never seen the sea. Across the higher ranges of the Balkans lay a tangle of Vlachs – the limping Vlachs, Black Vlachs, Albano-Vlachs, Arumanians, the Sarakatsans who roamed deep into Anatolia; some who protested that they were not Vlachs at all, and others who pretended to be Vlachs; and some who gave wickedness a country, Klephtouria; and some barely recognised even in the 1940s, who covered both the Balkans and the highlands of Anatolia in their shepherd rounds, and spoke, it appears, the Greek of the ancient Greeks, unmixed by the speech of invaders since before Christ; and some who were thought dirtier than anyone in the world; and one (according to Eliot in the late nineteenth century), who built himself a summer residence in the hills, and proved to be so houseproud that he repaired a broken window with a new piece of glass, instead of a sheet of brown paper, ‘a proceeding, I believe, unique in the Levant’.

  It paid the nomads to appear fierce and truculent, and to hold themselves aloof; for they were notoriously hard to tax. Townsmen, though in principle afraid, were fascinated by them. When a Bedouin chief pitched camp near the walls of Damascus, he received a flood of visitors. Some of them, an English merchant recalled, got to spend the night in a tent. One made the chief a hot meat pie, although ‘when he saw it cut up and opened, and perceived smoake to come out of it, he shrunke backe, fearing it had beene some engine to destroy him, and that the fire would follow after the smoake’. Eventually ‘he was content to taste it, and highly commended it, as the daintiest dish that ever he tasted of in his life’.

  The Ottomans were always interested in effective forms of selfgovernment. They reissued the exemplary Saxon mining laws they inherited with the Balkan mines, as part of the Sultan’s own kanun. They folded the old Serbian voynuk into the military organisation. ‘They pay great respect to the customs of foreign nations,’ it seemed to Busbecq, ‘even to the detriment of their own religious scruples.’

  The Ottomans demanded that
every subject should belong to the retinue of some great man; or to one of the guilds which regulated the quality and price of a man’s work, told him where to live, and protected him in hard times; or to a regiment, a religious fraternity, or just a village, as the responsibility of a headman. The affairs of the Muslim community were perfectly regulated by the Koran, which was law as much as faith; and while it was the Sultan’s duty to ensure that Islamic law prevailed in any conflict between Muslims and unbelievers, Christians and Jews were expected to have their own laws, too. Everyone was organised in millets, based on faith, and as long as the millet did not come into conflict with Islamic organisation and society, provided it stumped up its taxes and kept the peace, its leaders were left to run their own affairs.

  The authorities established the millets in law as simply as possible. The Orthodox Christians had recognised a number of independent churches before the Ottoman conquest, but Mehmet II abolished all rivals to the ecumenical Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, to whom he gave three horsetails, and wide-ranging clerical and secular powers over his flock. The Jews formed their own millet shortly afterwards. The Gregorian Patriarch ruled not only over the Armenian population within the empire, but over everyone else who had been left out, the gypsies, the Assyrians, the Monophysites of Syria and Egypt, and the Bogomils of Bulgaria. The Armenian millet was extremely useful, for its elasticity; and as time wore on it came to include the Maronites of Lebanon, who answered to the Pope in Rome, the Latin Catholics of Hungary, Croatia and northern Albania, and the uniate Armenians of Cilicia and Palestine.

  Shielded from the bullies of the Counter-Reformation, Protestant doctrine spread through Ottoman Hungary: the boy levy, in fact, was never extended to Hungary, and in the Balkans, beyond this single imposition, no efforts were made to convert Christians to Islam. Sixteenth-century cadastral registers suggests that only about 300 families in the entire Balkan region converted in any year, and conversion was a feature of town life. The empire wanted tax-paying subjects, not Muslims: one function of the levy, which so outraged Christian spectators, was precisely to limit the number of converts. Mehmet the Conqueror would always meet the Greek Patriarch Gennadius at the church door, not for fear of polluting himself by entering an infidel place of worship but, conversely, for fear of consecrating it: wherever he placed his foot was hallowed ground,* and his followers could have seized upon his entry into the church as an excuse to turn it into a mosque.

  Mehmet enacted sumptuary laws soon after the conquest, and the medley of costumes in the streets of a city indicated order. Greeks wore black trousers and slippers; the Armenians violet slippers and purple trousers; the Jews sky-blue trousers and slippers, and certain very privileged non-believers were allowed to wear yellow slippers and red trousers, like a Turk. Arsenal guards stuck knives in their belts. Dustmen had red leather smocks. Hajjis, who had completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, were entitled to a green turban. Important personages sported tall turbans, wound around a sort of witch’s hat; holy men wound their turbans round a skullcap, so that they were wider and flatter, and wore black gowns. In the countryside every district and valley and mountain and profession had its own distinctive variant of dress. Travellers were slotted into the order of things through the rules of Ottoman hospitality, which placed responsibility for their conduct on their hosts. Visitors of the highest rank, ambassadors and their suites, were maintained at public expense;† others, by charity. Foreign merchants answered to their own representatives in Smyrna, perhaps, or Istanbul, and were to be chastised in their own courts (unless the offence was against a Muslim) just as the janissaries were brought to book in theirs.

  Caste was much more important than class: no man was dishonourable who fulfilled the role he was born to play.* ‘When a rich man meets an inferior in the street,’ wrote Hobhouse in the early nineteenth century, ‘he not only returns his salute but goes through the whole round of complimentary enquiries which are always usual on a casual encounter.’ The easy familiarity of master and slave was a source of constant wonder to visitors from the West, but there was no shame or blame attached to slavery. It was another way of belonging. Busbecq wondered ‘whether the man who first abolished slavery was really a public benefactor; there would not perhaps be need of so many gallows and gibbets to restrain those who possess nothing but their life and liberty, and whose want drives them to crimes of every kind’, which he recognised as characteristic of his own country.

  The citizens of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), with characteristic foresight, had petitioned the Pope for permission to trade with infidels right after the Turks’ first serious victory in Europe, on the Maritsa in 1371; and by the fifteenth century the Ottomans had taken Ragusa under their wing, turning the bustling city-state on the Adriatic into their own Venice, to every doge’s fury and despair. The Ragusans appear to have taught the Turks how to make guns in the 1390s, and though the Ottomans stopped the lucrative export of silver from Ragusa the city thrived, its income from Ottoman trade and transhipment always, at a pinch, exceeding the tribute it paid to Istanbul. The Ottomans kept Ragusa’s merchants lean enough to follow at a whisper the flux of trade. Ragusans monopolised the salt trade and their councils – or plazza – were established in every major Ottoman town in Europe.

  Power within the city lay firmly with the nobility, who decided in the Grand Council on tariffs and decrees. Policy was decided by a Legislative Council of fifty-one elected nobles, and the daily management of affairs entrusted to a Little Council of eleven. At the head of state stood a sort of doge, the Rector, or Knez. Most of these leaders, Paul Rycaut thought, were selected by a process even more extraordinary than anything Venice could devise – the Rector elected once a month, and lesser officers once a week, and a chatelain singled out by the senate in secret conclave, winked at in the street, blindfolded, and given command for exactly twenty-four hours. The Rector was allowed one term of office only. He lived his month out in the palace – indeed, he was barricaded into it by elaborate protocol and ceremonial – and while all the nobility treated him with enormous reverence, and to some 30,000 ordinary citizens he seemed like the very embodiment of the republic’s power, he enjoyed not a whiff of it. Everything was decided by the Little Council. He was obliged to retire when his term was out, and was thereafter never allowed to display any emblem of his former rank until he died, when the regalia were placed on his coffin.

  The Ragusans’ behaviour was so mild and noble that they had erected a municipal old people’s home by 1347, abolished all trafficking in slaves by the fifteenth century, forbidden torture, organised a dole, established a public health service, a town planning institute, and numerous schools; and perhaps once in a quarter-century when their courts were obliged to pass the death sentence they would import a Turkish executioner, and plunge the entire city into mourning. So commercially minded were the nobility who supervised the state that in 1428, at a time of misfortune and foreign threat, they sought to jolly the people by erecting a column dedicated to freedom; the figure they set at the top was of Orlando, a popular knight; but the expense of the undertaking was prudently carried by making his forearm an official measure of length, everywhere known as the Dubrovnik Elbow.

  The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492: a millet launched on the high seas. Sultan Bayezit II heard of their predicament and ordered his governors to receive them with kindness and assistance. ‘They say Ferdinand is a wise monarch,’ he told his courtiers. ‘How could he be, he who impoverishes his country to enrich mine!’ The Spanish Jews after all knew everything, from how to card fine wool to how to manage funds at interest; and they had arrived with a useful knowledge of the ways of a world which the Ottomans fully expected to conquer. Some expected to return – on the back of Ottoman victory or not – and treasured huge old keys to Granadan spice vaults, to palaces with shady courtyards filled with the sound of running water, or to synagogues and banks. For generations, like the Moriscos of North Africa, they regaled their children with stories of the
high old Spanish days. Yet in the empire they found themselves very well received; their religion was respected on a par with Christianity, and they were soon writing to friends, agents and acquaintances all across Europe, encouraging them to join them.

  Ragusa

  They established themselves in every major Balkan city, in Sarajevo, Zemun, Skopje, Belgrade, Monastir, Edirne and Sofia; but above all they settled in Salonica, Thessaloniki, the city to whose ancient Jews – established there, it is said, from the days of Alexander – St Paul had addressed his Epistles. Under the Byzantines, Salonica had been the second city of the empire, with half a million inhabitants; the Jews found it decayed to a kind of swollen village of seven thousand souls, littered with vestiges of Roman rule: not unlike Spain. So the exiled merchant bankers, teachers, officials, doctors, scholars and craftsmen turned Turkish Selanik into a Spanish city, where one could hear the accents of Catalonia and Valencia, Portuguese, the guttural Spanish of Galicia, fluid Castilian, the soft, half-Moorish tones of Andalucia.

  The principle of collective responsibility was one of the conditions of Ottoman rule, like boy tribute, which the Chians tried to dodge when they surrendered their Aegean island to Ottoman sovereignty.

  Chios had been a Genoese protectorate since the thirteenth century, and it was ruled as a family firm, in a manner which chimed exactly with the commercial instincts of Genoa itself. Power was concentrated in the hands of shareholders, the Mahona, all descendants of a single Genoese clan, the Giustiniani, who emigrated there en masse in 1346 and took up, as it were, a commercial franchise on the island. Giovanni Giustiniani, who so nearly saved Constaninople in 1453, was carried back there to die of a broken heart. So powerful were the Giustiniani that every newcomer automatically took their name, and so sensible that from 1407 they had paid the Turks a tribute every year, and so righteous that when Antonio, Bartolomeo, Britio, Cornelio, Filippino, Francesco, Giovanni, Hercole, Hippolito, Paolo, two Pasquales, Rafaelle, and Scipione Giustiniani, with four other Giustiniani boys whose names are lost, were sent to the Seraglio, they suffered martyrdom rather than change their faith, and one of them was so steadfast in his refusal to raise his index finger as a sign of apostasy that ‘he clenched his fists so tightly that neither in life nor in death could they ever open them again’. The bulk of Chios’s people, though, were Greek.