Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  10

  Cities

  It has been said that every Ottoman city was a little Istanbul, with baths, mosques, covered bazaars, and a zoning law that kept the communities at arm’s length, especially at night. Most Ottoman towns were built on slopes, like Constantinople, partly because most Ottoman land sloped, and partly because everyone was entitled to a view. While the bazaars were open there was a jostling and mingling of crowds, regardless of religion, and membership of most guilds was open to all. But come nightfall the centre of the city closed down like a modern shopping mall, patrolled by watchmen, and the people who worked there went home to their respective quartiers. There was little excuse for strangers to wander the streets, and crime was rare. Travellers had their needs met centrally, at the han, or hostel; and they were often greeted with suspicion when they started coming for no better reason than to please themselves. Edward Lear found himself embroiled in an ugly altercation when he began to sketch in Elbasan in 1848; people objected to being ‘written down’ and a crowd gathered, shouting that he was a devil. A green-turbaned greybeard shrieked it demagogically to the winds, ‘Shaitan! Shaitan!’ – until Lear rather stiffly packed up his brushes and ran away, under a shower of stones.

  Ottoman cities tended to reflect the demands of private, not public, life: they lacked the architectural embellishment of the piazza, where private and public intersect, and if there was an open space, a meydan, it was a rough field for the pitching of tents, or sports. Whole districts were discrete – the migrant working men of Istanbul were locked in at night, as was the street of prostitutes – and every home was screened as far as possible from the road. In Syrian cities the streets were full of blank walls, and dead ends; in Hungary, on the whole, the downstairs windows were boarded up. Each Muslim home, of course, had its public and private areas, the reception room where visitors took coffee or smoked the nargile, and the harem, reserved for the family, where even policemen in search of a criminal were forbidden to go. With its hugger-mugger domesticity, the Turkish ideal of a home was very seductive; and in late-nineteenth-century Pera, although the Greeks might walk abroad in western dress, ‘one is obscurely conscious that the whole business is a ceremony and a show … confirmed by those rare peeps into domestic mysteries which fall to a foreigner’s lot – passing visions of inner rooms where there are more divans than chairs, men in slippers and dressing gowns, and numerous elderly, black-robed female relatives who attend to the household duties, and do not appear in society’. In Smyrna, the domestic scene was given spice by the tandour, a stove under a table covered with a quilt; the women would ‘draw the quilt up to their chins, which makes them look as if they were all in bed together’.

  Muslim features tended to dominate city life. Most Balkan cities, if not first founded by the Turks, were settled by Muslims after the native population fled; Christian townsmen were often latecomers moving back on Turkish terms, behaving so much à la mode that western travellers frequently supposed towns with a varied population to be entirely Turkish – if they recognised them as towns at all, for queerest of all, to western eyes, was the look of a city from afar, without walls or a citadel. Pax Ottomanica rendered them superfluous.

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  Every city seemed to distil some quality of Ottoman dominion. Damascus’s wealth and industry bore the legacy of the classical Islamic world. Bursa, where the Silk Road ended, was their first capital, City of the Theologians, and the city to which members of the Ottoman dynasty returned to be buried in a garden overlooking the domes and minarets, with a silver-ribboned plain beyond, and the snowy cap of Mount Olympus to one side, and to the other a cataract of the clearest water, which fed half the cisterns of the town.

  The Green Mosque at Bursa

  Belgrade was the empire martial, crenellated, bastioned, violent: so that as late as 1848, when a German visitor crossed the Danube (a one-and-a-half-hour journey, in such stormy weather that the Austrian boatmen refused to make the crossing and recommended him to a loitering party of Turks, who being a courageous and fatalistic people, they said, would ferry a man across even if the waves reached the ramparts of Belgrade castle) his first impression of the city was of the castle, in a state of serious disrepair, but still garrisoned by Turks, though the whole country around was self-governing Serbia.

  Suleyman the Magnificent had used its capture in 1520 to signal the return of the Turks to Europe, after two decades fighting in the East, and it became the base for operations further up the Danube. Mohacs followed, when the flower of Hungarian chivalry fell; then Buda itself; and Belgrade became the bastion of Turkey in Europe, as it had been of Hungary in the Balkans.

  It remained, in consequence, rather grim. Whenever the army approached from the south-east, at least every other year, officers arrived to close the wine shops in advance; the huge troop encamped at Zemun, across the Sava. Here armies coming from Anatolia via Gallipoli met the armies marching up the Danube, and the levies of the Principalities. Civilians could be brought up smartish by a rapped-out order in the street, as they scuttled by; and most of them, anyway, worked for the army, sewing, nailing, polishing, butchering, so that they lived always with the dread of requisitions, and earned themselves a reputation for fly behaviour and artificial poverty which did nothing to improve the city’s appearance.

  Kara Mustafa, fleeing back in 1683 with a hundred excuses for his failure to take Vienna, was bowstrung in Belgrade by the Sultan’s messengers. In the great Austrian push which followed Kara Mustafa’s defeat Belgrade was at last taken by the Duke of Bavaria in 1688. Six years later, when the Austrian garrison which held the island of Orsona on the Danube negotiated their surrender to the Turks, the governor stipulated that he and his people should be given transport, and safe conduct, to the city. The Turks politely advised him to choose a better destination, telling the governor that Belgrade was in Turkish hands again; but such was the city’s reputation that the governor refused to believe them. He and his 600 men, women and children did go to Belgrade, as they had wished, and were put in a fort for a day or two, then disarmed, chained and sold into slavery, while the youths were shaved and circumcised and sent to join the army.

  In 1717 the brilliant Prince Eugene retook the city for Austria, but his military successors lost it again in 1739. After half a century of peace, the Ottomans surrendered the city in 1789, but then two years later it was surrendered back to them. It was still a bunker in 1804, though meaner, and dirtier, and more cruel, pinched by want and pricked on by greed, when the janissaries solemnised their affection for the place, and made it the base of a sort of janissary junta, ruling over Serbia in defiance of everybody else: of Constantinople, which had complex treaty obligations to carry out, involving their removal; of the Turkish cavalrymen, who tended to live on their Serbian estates, and whose rivalry with the janissaries stretched back centuries, like the factions of ancient Rome, sharpened by the prospect of carving up Serbia for themselves; of the Serbs, led by the janissary turned rebel, Kara George, at the head of a national uprising. Belgrade and the janissaries had a lot in common: both decayed and immovable. Kara George and his Serbs finally took Belgrade in 1806;in the process he dealt a death blow to the janissary junta, and a more regular Ottoman army retook it in 1813.

  A semi-autonomous Serbian state was declared around it in 1814, but still the Ottomans refused to recognise their loss of Belgrade, and while the city developed in its own way, an Ottoman garrison bunkered in the citadel and the green flag of the empire fluttered from its pale tower until 1867.

  If Belgrade was all martial punch, Sarajevo expressed the Ottoman instinct for gentle hospitality. It was in Sarajevo that the camel caravans from Anatolia and beyond terminated, and their goods were transferred to mules and horses, for after Sarajevo the camels tended to fall ill.* The Sarajevans were widely noted for their gentleness and their learning; ‘everyone befriended us’, writes M. Quiclet, who passed through in 1658; their fame reached Syria. Lying on the east–west route from Ragusa int
o the empire, it grew into a city of wealth and industry, well able to afford, in later years, a sort of dashing semi-independence from the Porte, whose pashas at times found it hard to enter the city at all, and were reduced, in the end, to spending three nights a year there. A trading town as Belgrade was a garrison town, multifarious as Belgrade was monolithic, by the sixteenth century it expressed all that was liveliest in a region of expanding wealth, with a growing population. Sarajevo was full of parks, Sephardim, gypsies, Muslims, and members of old Bosnian families who had turned Turk to keep their estates; and perhaps it derived its kindliness from the sense of well-being that prompted the Sarajevans to count their blessings so punctiliously. Never before the days of Soviet tour guides were statistics so freely trotted out as they were to visitors to Sarajevo. The traveller Evliya Celebi rhapsodised over its bustle and piety, with 1,080 shops selling goods from India and Bohemia, more than a thousand ‘elderly people’ in excellent health, and 17,000 houses; while Quiclet admired every one of the city’s 169 fountains. In October 1697 Prince Eugene, drawing up his troops on a ridge overlooking the town, was able to admire its size, its openness and its 120 fine mosques before he burnt it to the ground.

  Of all the cities of the empire, Constantinople was the largest, wealthiest, greediest, and most influential. Topkapi, the city palace, expressed the principle of unity which bound up this sprawling empire. The city’s position was the soldered joint which bound the bell of Ottoman Asia to the balloon of Ottoman Europe. Its barracks housed the only standing army in Europe, the notorious janissaries, whose lives were dedicated to war. Its Arsenal witnessed the industry which sustained – for a giddy moment – Ottoman claims to command the Black Sea and the White. The highest religious authorities in Mehmet’s day were the kadi askers, judges in the army, one for Rumelia, and one for Anatolia; but so centrist and singular was the influence of the Constantinople court that less than a century later the Grand Mufti of Constantinople was without question the empire’s leading Muslim dignitary, pictured by visitors as a sort of Islamic pontiff.*

  Just as the army, passing through the countryside, was able to feed and supply itself without reference to the surrounding lands, so Constantinople seemed to float free of its immediate environs, and spread its networks to the furthest reaches of the empire. By the mid-seventeenth century, 250 tons of bread were baked there every day; 18,000 oxen were slaughtered a month; seven million sheep and lambs a year – a tenth of it all went to the palace alone. Two thousand ships sailed in with foodstuffs each year. Nothing in Istanbul was left to chance, and so great was the city’s appetite that while it was the Venetians, famously, who discerned and pursued the pattern of trade in the eastern Mediterranean, it was really the Turks who willed that pattern into being, controlling it by fiat and regulation.

  Like every city in the empire, Constantinople’s markets were patrolled by a kadi with summary powers. He knew the true price of tripe soup, and kept an eye on the brain vendors in case they substituted suet. He inspected cooking vessels to see that they were properly tinned; ensured that there were three grades of high boot; and demanded that shoes should last two days for every asper the buyer gave for them. Profit was generally limited to ten per cent, although the profit on goods brought from afar was hard to gauge. For reasons which have never been quite explained, the butcher’s trade in the capital was a ruinous one before the seventeenth century, and was forced upon rich men as a form of punishment. ‘False weight is what the civil policy prosecute and punish with the utmost rigour, and it is not uncommon, as you pass the streets, to run against a pendent Baker’s body for three days consecutively’, Porter recalled.

  So rich were the marts of Constantinople that the Georgians, who were very poor, began sending their children as slave tribute to the city, while the Georgian ambassador would recoup the cost of his visit by selling off his entire retinue, right up to his steward and his secretary, slipping home with no more than an interpreter and a contribution to the public treasury.

  Trade was the one area of civil life where the Ottomans felt obliged to interfere, to maintain the efficiency of their armies, and the security of the city streets. By Islamic tradition, a just ruler should be a prosperous one, open-handed with his people, never suffering them to want; and Islamic cities had a proud old tradition of grain revolts when the ruler failed to deliver. The prosperity of the artisan depended on him receiving a fair price for his work, and this was enshrined in guild legislation. The people had to be protected from overcharging and scarcity.

  Constantinople, Giovanni Vavassore, c. 1520

  Once the dust of Ottoman conquest settled, everyone seemed to get richer by the year. The population of the empire doubled in the sixteenth century. Everybody had something to do, and everywhere teemed with life and activity, not only the markets of the capital, or the roadsteads of the Bosphorus. Morosini thought the empire so busy and prosperous that its security no longer depended on the number or the quality of its fortresses – ‘of which they have few’ – but ‘on the abundance it has of all the necessities of life. Not only is there enough for the daily needs of her people, but great quantites of foods and other goods are exported … There could be even more if there were additional people to cultivate the fields.’ Moldavia and Wallachia, Sandys added, ‘doe serve them with Beeves and Muttons; and as for Fish, the adjoyning Seas yeeld store and variety … ’ ‘Everywhere in the woods of Mingrelia,’ Busbecq reported, ‘under the shade of widespreading trees, you can see the common people reclining in groups and keeping holiday with wine and dance and song.’

  Even in the hinterlands, people moved round in a purposeful way: timariots travelling light to new timars, bureaucrats bustling round with their registers, the Kapudan Pasha setting out with the fleet to raise the tribute from the islands, nomads heading up for the hills and green pastures; the Sultan splendidly processing to winter quarters in Edirne, where he would hunt in the royal parks until the frogs’ croakings became a nuisance. Trade was conducted on an imperial scale. Bertrand de la Brocquière was in Damascus when a caravan came in from the desert, and it took two nights, and three days, to settle in. In Belgrade’s shops in the mid-sixteenth century a German visitor found ‘everything as in the most advanced cities of Italy and Germany’.

  Bazaars constructed in every Ottoman town offered goods (produced under the watchful eye of the guilds) that were hard to resist. A decent bow was made from a maple wand taken at Kastomonu, buffalo sinew, boiled horn, and glue from a resin found at the Danube’s mouth. Matured for a year, and fed linseed oil, it would last two centuries. The horsehair bowstring was steeped in beeswax, resin and fish glue. Arrow flights were made of tortoiseshell or ivory, of swan, eagle or cormorant feathers; their tips were goat-bone, their shafts pine. ‘Exquisitely made,’ a French visitor exclaimed, ‘and so durable.’ Cheap, too; although many items were forbidden to foreigners – Salonica cotton, for example, was made to a special grade for janissary uniforms. Much was smuggled. Nile linen was available, Bursan brocades and velours, mohair, coarse woollens from Plovdiv, fine woollen yarns from Edirne and Salonica which were made by the Spanish Jews; silk and carpets. Foreigners came for spices from the Far East, scents, soaps and drugs; Iznik tileware, Istanbul paper, Hebron glass; in return the Europeans traded woollens, paper, English steel, and a lot of silver. The Ottomans, in turn, were indebted to their east – against which, oddly enough, they erected the same kind of barrier, part psychological and hygienic, part physical watch-towers, as western Europe was erecting against them. They took musk, rhubarb and porcelain from the Chinese, and furs, which were important ceremonial items, from the Muscovites, as well as birds of prey, amber and mercury; the Tartars supplied them with bows and arrows, bucklers and caviar, with leather from Kazan, and white slaves; while the Sudan sent them gold, and black slaves.

  When Rycaut wrote that ‘all the delightful Fields of Asia, the pleasant Plains of Tempe and Thrace, all the Plenty of Egypt, and Fruitfulness of the Nile, the L
uxury of Corinth, the Substance of Peloponnesus, Athens, Lemnos, Scio and Mitylene, with other Isles of the Aegean Sea, the Spices of Arabia, and the Riches of a great part of Persia, all Armenia, the Provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Phrygia, Lycia, Pamphylia, Palestine, Coelosyria and Phoenicia, Colchis, and a great part of Georgia, the Tributary Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Servia, and the best part of Hungary, concur all together to satisfie the appetite of one single Person’.

  Within Mehmet II’s lifetime the hapless rulers of the principalities had remade their coinage on Ottoman models, the better to facilitate exchange; and when Moldavia became a vassal state, its boyars launched the process of supplying the Istanbul markets which led to the enserfment of the population. On the Moldavian hillsides and the upper slopes of the Carpathians, no shepherd might sell his flock until the imperial commissioners had made their purchases, at the stipulated price. As the shores of the Black Sea were drawn into the Ottoman world, by threat and conquest, there were nuts and fruits for Constantinople and timber for fleets, while the Bulgars reared horses, and the Greeks of the islands crushed olives, and the fishermen cast their nets, and from the shores of Lake Ohrid, sanctified and blue in the mountains of Macedonia, imperial messengers hotfooted it to the place with buckets of celestial trout.

  The Ottomans did not engage in much trade themselves but they taxed it, exports like imports, and would give their Ottoman equivalent of favoured nation status, called capitulations, to anyone who promised to supply the markets with regularity. The first such treaty, made with the French in 1534, allowed them to buy a limited quantity of Ottoman stuff and to import whatever they chose at preferential rates. To avoid friction, the French were given rights of extraterritoriality, which was effectively the same principle of collective responsibility the Ottomans applied to every subject community. Police yourselves, the Ottomans said, or suffer the consequences together. Other nations soon clamoured for capitulations of their own: the English in 1567, the Dutch five years later. The busiest foreign presence in the ports was Venice, of course, which more than once endured treaties which were politically crushing but commercially advantageous, using brisk, cheap warfare as a last resort, to be dropped as soon as a point was gained, before diving into the sea of diplomacy.