Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  By 1566 the Ottomans, at the height of their power, were fed up with the Chians. Their tribute payments arrived late, if at all. They showed none of the respect to which the Ottomans, as overlords, were entitled; on the contrary their spies reported on Ottoman affairs, and passed intelligence to the West. They were full of trickery and deceit. The Grand Vizier had at one time threatened ‘to blow the roofs off all the houses in Chios’ because they had imprudently cultivated his predecessor, along with other enemies of his at court. As long as their primary allegiance was to Genoa, the Chian authorities were a menace to Ottoman power; and the Ottomans resolved to do something about it.

  It was the custom for the imperial fleet to collect its tribute every year, making a tour of all the islands; and when the Chians spotted the Turkish sails ‘the garrison sounded the tocsin to inform the government, and the inhabitants and the envoys in large boats richly decorated with costly hangings and dressed in the ancient style in long robes of crimson velvet, went to meet the fleet; and after welcoming the admiral with one salute from a gun, the other captains saluted the town in similar manner’. In 1566 the fleet, under the Chians’ old friend Admiral Piali Pasha, chose to anchor, instead, outside the harbour mouth. The Mahonesi were debating anxiously what this deviation from routine could mean, when Piali ordered them aboard his flagship. There he warned them that they had placed themselves beyond the pale by their own misconduct, spying, hiding runaway slaves, sheltering Italian pirates, and not paying their dues. The elders replied that the Sultan’s ear had been bent by the malicious falsehoods of their enemies, that their so-called spies were merchants – ‘it is impossible for our town to survive without trade’ – and that the arrears were simply due to the fact that the Ottomans observed the lunar calendar, while they observed the solar one.

  Meanwhile the Chian populace had gathered in the streets and drawn their own uncomfortable conclusions. From the shore came wailing and shrieking and cries for mercy which drowned out Piali Pasha’s response. At last the Mahonesi heard him say that his duty brought him no pleasure; ‘God knows how heavy is my heart and how I feel for you all.’ The subsequent occupation of the island went exactly to plan. Ten thousand troops were landed, with scimitars concealed under their overcoats; for in order to quiet the populace it was given out that they had come to buy cloth for uniforms and canvas for sails, as they did every year. Their officers were ordered to prevent any molestation of the inhabitants, and to reassure the Chians that they had nothing to fear as the action was only aimed at those who had disobeyed the Gran Signor.

  The infantry seized control of the fortress without resistance, commandeered all the munitions dumps, and ran up the Turkish flag in place of the standard of St George. Piali then came ashore in a white brocade uniform and rode through the town, where two soldiers who had molested inhabitants were instantly impaled as an example. Piali spent the night in town, while his troops patrolled the streets.

  The following day, Piali ordered the destruction of idols in the churches, and had two of the best converted into mosques, although he left the Catholic bishop his cathedral. Five hundred non-resident aliens were arrested, including many Knights of Malta and some noblemen from Naples and Messina, who were placed in the Ottoman galleys, to be sold as slaves or held to ransom. In the governor’s palace the admiral again received the terrified Mahonesi. He asked them to be seated and then sat down himself. In a curious and presumably ancient ceremony, he signalled the transfer of power from the Genoese to the Ottomans, holding a bow in one hand and three arrows in the other, demanding to know whether they submitted to the will of the Sultan. The Mahonesi replied that they had always been the Sultan’s slaves and that his orders would remain graven on their brows. Piali then made the same reply to his own question, and the litany was thrice repeated. Then he stood up, handed the bow and arrows to a page, and quietly addressed them all. ‘I knew nothing when I was handed the order. I had no time to make any counter representations, but had to bury my feelings and carry out the order. I have done so in the most lenient manner possible, and I swear by the head of my Lord and by the sword hanging by my side that I have not by a long way acted as I was instructed. Be of good cheer, therefore, and know that I shall not fail to do all in my power in your favour.’

  The lives of the Mahonesi were spared, but the grander of them were sent into exile in Kaffa, a former Genoese colony on the Black Sea, while the lesser fry, to ransom themselves, sold their houses in the campos for nominal sums, by which the ancestral Chian properties passed into the hands of Turks, who kept them until the Greek army occupied the island in 1912. A garrison of a mere 700 men was placed in the castle – Chios was sufficiently close to Asia Minor for reinforcements to be rushed across, if either Genoa or, as was possible, the King of Spain attempted a counter-attack. Two months later, leaving behind a fully fledged Ottoman administration, headed by a Hungarian renegade, which he had brought with him from Istanbul,* the admiral set sail for Naxos, which he also occupied.

  Piali Pasha’s protestations of friendship, like the charges he was instructed to bring against the Mahona, seem to have been perfectly genuine. The Chians were guilty, and he saved their necks; yet in October 1566, nothing daunted, its leading citizens, Latin and Greek, sent an embassy to Constantinople to see whether they could negotiate their independence again. They counted on the help of the French ambassador in Istanbul, who considered himself the protector of all the Roman Catholics in the empire, and their embassy was led by Mgr Timoteo Giustiniani, the Catholic bishop of the island. They first approached Piali Pasha, who proved very amenable to the project, and promised to promote it in the divan for a staggered fee of 25,000 ducats. Piali’s enemy, though, the Grand Vizier, automatically vetoed the idea. ‘Would to God that we had never had recourse to Piali Pasha,’ one of the merchants wrote; while Piali very generously allowed them to try their hand directly instead, forgoing his fee. What they got – after some very tough negotiating – was not independence, but a series of privileges ‘which are not to be scorned’, for they amounted to the same commercial privileges enjoyed by the French.

  Women of Chios

  The Chians’ autonomy was increased when they renegotiated the pact eleven years later – the Ottomans knew that toughness could be followed by concessions – so that the Chians found themselves not only free of the Giustiniani but enjoying, indeed, imperium in imperio. They were spared the boy tribute, and the application of collective responsibility. They were permitted to keep commercial colonies in the Levantine ports, and to maintain trading links with Italy and the West, and they stayed rich. Ottoman protection over Chian merchant vessels was surer and cheaper than the precarious protection offered by Genoa; yet in some ways the legacy of Genoa was preserved, as well. Right up to the twentieth century the Chians put salt in their babies’ mouths, like Italians, and believed in fairies, and first-footed their neighbours on New Year’s Eve. They stuck to the lunetted vault, and the peculiar sway of the Genoese staircase; and many went to Padua for their education. Their hospital was erected on a Florentine model; vaccination was invented by a Chian, Emmanuel Timoni; and Chians did especially well for themselves when they arrived, centuries later, in America. The Greeks of the island moved into administrative positions formerly denied them by the Giustiniani, and spearheaded the general movement of Greeks into the Ottoman administration, too, until it became proverbial that sensible men were as rare in Chios as green mice and green horses. In 1669 the Grand Vizier Ahmed Koprulu created for Panayoti, his secretary, who had been useful to him in Crete, the office of Dragoman of the Porte. He was succeeded by another Chian, Alex Mavrocordato, who was a signatory to the treaty of Karlowitz. The Chians maintained friendly relations with the Porte until 1822, when the frenzy born of terror and despair provoked an Ottoman massacre on the island.

  ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the bishop’s mitre,’ the Byzantines had once declared, and again and again, as islands under Catholic rule had fallen to the Turks, t
he Greek inhabitants received them with guarded jubilation. They invariably preferred direct Turkish rule to that rabble of Normans, adventurers, Neapolitans, crusaders and, above all, Venetians who had lorded it over the islands since the sack of Constantinople in 1204, fighting and raiding and marrying each other, but never giving much thought to the Greeks who paid for it all with their labour, unless they meant to interfere with their religion. From time to time the Turks introduced goats onto the islands, which ate up the herbage, and one little island at the mouth of the Sea of Marmara was abandoned to hares of ‘varying colours’; but an old Greek on Lemnos spoke for the entire region when he told Belon du Mans that ‘never had the island been so well cultivated or so rich, and had as many people as now’.

  Western merchants admired the Chians tremendously, because they were good at doing just what the westerners did; but the Chian case was not unique. There were any number of other imperiae in this imperio, plenty of niches where various people could find a firm and prosperous footing. The Turks reserved the bulk of war’s glory for themselves, of course. But they did not make a monopoly of it, and wherever they met talent they gave it scope.

  The savviest raiders were the Bosnian Muslims of the Hungarian border. Evliya Celebi describes a raid’s aftermath, in 1666, when the slaves were thrown into the dungeons of Kanija, the raiders were given town hospitality, and a five-day auction of slaves and their goods began. Ten of the fifty slaves went to the pasha as the imperial one-fifth. After paying off the guides and the gatekeepers, giving alms, and buying the sheep to be sacrificed to the memory of the dead soldiers, 1,490 gazi divided the remainder of the spoils in the Sultan Mehmet III mosque. Evliya himself got four shares extra, two for his servants and two for seeing to all the paperwork, and he wound up business by reciting verses in his lovely voice while everyone joined in fervent prayers for Islam, the Prophet, the holy martyrs, the dead raiders and the saints.

  There were not many who could mount a raid with such style, and conclude it with such adroitness. But for slaving wholesale, there were none like the Tartars of the Crimea, who had once been aloof but essentially harmless tradesmen, supplying up-country goods to the Italians on the Black Sea. They became the slave-runners of southern Russia, ‘as jackal to the Turkish lion’, Rycaut described them, heads half-shaved, terrible mustachios flying in the wind, making raids into Poland and the Ukraine. From there they would drive their captives down to the coast – 10,000 slaves were exported from Jaffa every year. They marinaded their meat, notoriously, beneath the saddle, in horse’s sweat.

  If Tartars made the best slavers, then Circassians unquestionably made the best slaves. Russians* and Poles were esteemed in the galleys; Hungarians, Venetians and Germans ‘are thought incapable of all drudgery, by reason of the softness of their Bodies, and the Women of giving pleasure proper to their Sex by the hardness of theirs’, but a Circassian might go for 1,000 imperial crowns, and a German for a quarter of the price. At home, Cantemir reported, the Circassians were ‘always devising something new in their Habits and Arms, in which they are so passionately followed by the Tartars, that they may well be called the French of the Tartars’. They had a morbid horror of obesity – nobody fat could be considered noble, and both boys and girls slept on hard boards to keep them thin. In the markets the Circassians were prized beyond a horse or a woman for their beauty, good proportions, modesty, and capacity for instruction; the boys were sharp-witted and made good artisans, while slave-farms were ultimately established in the Caucasus, turning out odalisques to supply a ready market.

  The Albanians, like the Circassians, came from impenetrable and dirt-poor mountains, and had nothing to fall back on but their own bodies† – which they adorned as stylishly as the Circassians. Byron, who had himself painted in Albanian dress, thought their costume was ‘the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver mounted pistols & daggers’. With their queer, bristling language,‡ they considered themselves to be among the oldest inhabitants of Europe, and by the nineteenth century they had five alphabets, one with more than fifty letters. Albania was incorporated into the empire in 1468, and Albanians rose fast in the military and bureaucracy; they were all crack shots; and in time they established a monopoly over certain branches of building and medicine. The white skull-caps of Albanians were familiar on building sites in the Balkans well into this century; and they were famous for their skill in building perfect aqueducts. ‘Without any mathematical learning, precepts, or instruments, they make these Aqueducts, measure the height of mountains, distance of places, more exactly than a geometrician can, and judge very well of the quality and quantity of water. When they are asked the grounds of this art, they know not what you mean, nor can explain themselves.’ Their surgical skill was uncanny, too, for they could operate on ‘ruptures’ and have the patient up and well in a fortnight.

  Albanians

  Throughout the empire were regional specialisms the Ottomans were happy to exploit. In the equestrian world, everyone knew about the Bulgars, who raised horses in the plains of Thrace. No one could handle a camel better than the nomads of Arabia, who undertook to supply 30,000 of them every year when the army went to war. No one washed clothes whiter than the villagers of Kastamonu or made better paper than the papermakers of Constantinople, or drove a mule more stylishly than the muleteers of that city, who were so cocksure and inbred that they had a whole district of it to themselves. No rulers were so pliant and grovelling as the voivodes of Wallachia and Romania; no priests so otherworldly as the monks of Athos. The tilemakers of Iznik were legendary; and the work of Ragusan goldsmiths was as much in demand in Rome as in Constantinople. ‘God preserve you from the Hebrews of Salonica, the Greeks of Athens, and the Turks of Euboia!’ ran a proverb, honouring them respectively for their prowess in business, quarrelsomeness and strength. It was a very stable empire, and full of opportunity. Henry Holland, as late as the nineteenth century, observed that ‘the modern Greeks, like their ancestors, are fond of discriminating the peculiar character of the population, even in small districts and towns’.

  * British consul in Constantinople 1834–6, he travelled widely in the European portion of the empire and wrote a penetrating and entertaining apologia for Turkish rule in Spirit of the East. He retired to a Moorish palace in Watford, where he entertained naked in a Turkish bath. Lear considered him ‘very sufficiently mad’.

  * Like the roses which, the Albanians politely said, sprang up wherever Enver Hoxha trod.

  † Which of course put them on an uneasy footing, as any ambassador slung into gaol at the outbreak of hostilities discovered. The leap from generosity to implacable enmity was well illustrated in the fate of Baron Wratislaw, a young Bohemian nobleman who accompanied the imperial ambassador to Istanbul in 1599. He was of an open mind, high-spirited, and for a year he enjoyed himself hugely, but war with Austria broke out in 1600 and he and other members of the embassy were first imprisoned in the Arsenal, manacled in pairs, then in the dreaded Black Tower, in a room without light, so poorly treated that when they found a way to make a porridge out of hoarded scraps of bread they found it ‘extremely nice, especially when at times we procured some olive oil, made it rich for ourselves, and licked our fingers afterwards’. After hair-raising vicissitudes the party finally regained Prague, only narrowly escaping death as they blundered across the battlefields, and on their return the Emperor Rudolf personally listened to their tale, with tears in his eyes. ‘Wir wollen tun!’ he thundered when they asked him for some back pay, by way of compensation; but no doubt he was a busy man, for that was the last any of them heard of it.

  * Everyone, after all, was entitled to dignity. Edward Lear did a portrait of an Albanian merchant, and then one of his brother. For want of paper, he squeezed the second ‘small but accurate portrait’ onto the same sheet. ‘O, canto cielo!’ said the younger. ‘It is true I am the youngest, but I am not smaller than my brothe
r – what right have you to remind me of my inferior position? Why do you come into our house to act so insultingly?’ The older brother, too, declared himself ‘vexed and hurt… if you think that you win my esteem by a compliment paid at the expense of the affection of my brother, you are greatly mistaken.’ The pair bowed him out, ‘with looks of thunder’.

  * Shortly afterwards, a Dominican friar started an irrepressible rumour that the Turks had handed rule of the island to two illiterate peasants; but he was an unreliable adventurer. He later changed his name to Paleologus and was ultimately beheaded in Rome by the Inquisition.

  * Tartars stole Turkish children and passed them off as Russians.

  † Or rather the bodies of their women: when Edward Lear was driven to exclaim at the sight of Albanian women bent double under enormous burdens, his guide hastened to explain that although women were, indeed, inferior to mules, they were really much better than asses, or even horses.

  ‡ Lear made out among ‘the clatter of strange monosyllables – dort beer, dort bloo, dort hitch, hitch beer, blue beer, beer chak, dort gatch’.