Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  * In the museum you could inspect a long silver tube, which was used for giving camels their medicine.

  * An error scrupulously avoided by the Sultans, one of whom was to depress the pretensions of a mufti who claimed infallibility by remarking that he recognised only one pope.

  11

  The Sea

  The landscape was puckered by mountains, but it was washed, as well, by seas: dark and turbulent when the winds that every Mediterranean race detests howled from the water into the hills; brisk when the imperial fleet set out to make its circuit of the islands, the Mecca pilgrims crowded the sea lanes of the eastern Mediterranean, and the grain ships from Egypt came lumbering up to Istanbul.

  Under the early Arabs, the Mediterranean had been in Islam’s pocket. By the fifteenth century, the Turks had resolved to put it back there. The assembly of a fleet allowed Mehmet to take Constantinople. His pious successor, Bayezit the Sufi, laid the foundations of Ottoman maritime power, renovating the Arsenal to launch a fleet capable of sustaining war with Venice, the supreme maritime power of the age.

  Genoa suffered most from Ottoman conquest. The humble effort the Genoese had made, in 1423, to butter up their future conquerors by inviting the Sultan to put his mark on the tower they were building in Pera, and the neutrality they had observed during the siege of Constantinople, came to nothing. The fall of Constantinople closed up her access to the Black Sea, and shortly afterwards Genoa sold all her interests in her prosperous trading colonies in the Crimea and Trebizond to a joint stock company, the Company of St John. It proved to be a bad investment. In twenty years the Genoese were swept from the Black Sea, leaving their ship designs and their naval titles fixed in the Ottoman mind, so that an Ottoman admiral was called Kapudan Pasha, and the Ottoman navy constructed galleons with heavy cannon after the Genoese model, and galleys, too, the most effective and terrible of Mediterranean ships, in which men worked the oars in chains, and whose presence could be smelled from a mile away over the water.

  Swept from the sea, her company bankrupted, her colonies wasted, her retreat unmourned, Genoa hung on at Pera, and her galleys drifted through the Bosphorus; but her trade was very much reduced, and the Genoese were so disgusted by the loss of their Black Sea colonies, and by the fall of their islands in the Aegean between 1456 and 1462, that they were driven to make a clean break, and served the Spaniards as Venice serviced the Porte, giving Spain the Genoese sailor Columbus.

  Venice, famously, never made a break at all. She pursued her eastern trade, as ever mingling war with negotiation – ‘procureur de Mahomet’, as one Frenchman called her, ‘précurseur d’Antichrist’ – fending off the Turkish advance as long as she could, and losing her stepping stones to the Levant gradually, one by one – in 1499 she lost Lepanto, the first of her pearls, Coron and Modon in 1503, Nauplia in 1540, Cyprus in 1570. She had no illusions as to the cost of an all-out war with the Turks, and she made treaties which, however embarrassing politically, were commercially sound.

  ‘My Lord, you dwell in a city whose benefactor is the sea. If the sea is not safe no ships will come, and if no ships come Istanbul perishes,’ Selim I was once advised. Selim took Egypt, and Suleyman Rhodes, so that the eastern Mediterranean was secure, and relations with Venice were in practical terms an internal affair. ‘Write immediately to your Signoria,’ Suleyman commanded the Venetian bailio in 1533, ‘for it can find out what the fish are doing at the bottom of the sea, and also about the fleet which Spain is preparing …’ Andrea Gritti, who was Doge in 1523, learned his merchanting skills in Constantinople, and sired four bastards by an Ottoman concubine. He gave them a Renaissance education in Venice; but when their illegitimacy prevented them from taking office there, his favourite son, a graduate of Padua and Venice, went to Constantinople, befriended Ibrahim the Grand Vizier, was made the godson of the Gran Signor, and the keeper of Suleyman’s jewels. He amassed a fortune, maintained his own court and seraglio, and fed a thousand mouths. Suleyman even came to his house. He had the revenues from a Hungarian duchy, fought in the Hungarian campaign of 1528, and was present at the first siege of Vienna, even while his father was Doge of Venice. In 1530 he commanded an Ottoman army defending Buda. In 1534, while leading 3,000 men into the Principalities, this son of a doge and godson of a sultan, half-Venetian, half-Ottoman, was captured by Transylvanians and beheaded.

  Constantinople, seventeenth-century woodcut

  Alexander Kinglake was wrong when he called the sea the Doge’s blushing bride, but the Sultan’s bowing slave. The Black Sea fell to the Turks by default, once they controlled its shores and stopped up its entrance by capturing Constantinople. In the Mediterranean they were only too eager to franchise the business, so that Ottoman power there was upheld, on the whole, by old sea dogs who never became part of the machine of war proper, but who were bound to it by honours and special favours. The Ottomans ranked a kapudan pasha more highly than his landed equivalent – his ships’ lanterns took precedence over the horsetails – and they spent an inordinate amount of money on maritime matters; but they appointed generals to command their fleets, and sent in janissaries to man them, too.

  And the sea herself resisted systems. She was changeable and treacherous, a place of cruel winds, sudden squalls and unpredictable reverses. Topkapi was a tent of sorts, but not a ship; and the Sultan’s immutable order was no match for the sea’s caprices, any more than the Sultan’s person could be chanced to the vagaries of weather, enemies, corsairs, or the restrictive vulnerability of a battleship. ‘God had made the earth for their Dominion, and Enjoyment,’ the Ottomans privately confessed, ‘and the sea only for Christians’; and Muslim sailors would actually delay their sailing until after the Patriarch had blessed the sea in the spring. Only the Barbary corsairs, Rycaut believed, ever lost sight of dry land, and Ottoman maritime operations always lagged several years behind land campaigns. It was only after they had captured Greece that they began to pick on Venice’s islands and her ports in the Levant, beginning with Bayezit’s capture of Lepanto in 1499. The great naval clashes of the sixteenth century were an extension of landed enmity, the Turks striking at Spain to weaken her hold on Austria. Spanish fleets disputed all the forts of North Africa – Algiers, Tunis, Oran, Bizerta and Tripoli. The Turks threatened southern Italy, Sicily and Corsica. Neither, in the end, could quite make good their threats.

  This was, after all, an astonishingly broad frontier, and Mediterranean society had a tang of its own. Every seafarer was bound into one fraternity, with its own rules and rumours and scores to settle; every ship afloat flirted with piracy, and often succumbed; while sailors were always changing sides, so that Mediterranean sea battles are frequently shrouded in mystery, as fleets ostensibly bringing relief stand off, and admirals negotiate covertly with their enemies.

  There was Cigalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha, who at the age of sixteen had been captured by corsairs with his father, an Italian nobleman (and freebooter). The father paid a ransom to escape, and was ‘sent home so carefully that he died within three days’; but he left his son to try his fortune with the Turks. Cigalazade became Kapudan Pasha in time, and notoriously hard on Christians, so that Baron Wratislaw shifted uneasily before his scowl when he met him in 1599. He used to take his fleet to Messina, where his father had commanded a Spanish squadron, and go ashore to visit his old mother in her mantilla.* A Calabrian-born admiral, Kilic Ali Pasha, was the only commander to extricate himself with any honour from the débâcle off Lepanto in 1571, bringing off his ships to form the nucleus of a reconstituted fleet, and carrying in his hold the prisoner Cervantes, who was courteously treated.

  In the nest of pirates, nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, that was Algiers, full of swarthy men with daggers in their teeth, and vaults heaped with jewels, with harems filled with European heiresses and willowy Nubian girls, where the air was thick with musk and sweat, and the plight of prisoners grotesquely miserable, there swaggered the terrible corsair chieftains, among whom once were counted s
ix Greeks, an Armenian, and a face as Dutch as an Edam cheese, red rind and all. Algiers remained a hotbed of piracy well into the nineteenth century, when even the Americans primly demanded an end to the pirates’ activities. The Porte hardly dared admit that it had no control. The men of Algiers retained their worldly cynicism, and were anxious not to be thought anyone’s fool, so that when in 1815 Consul Broughton brought the Dey of Algiers a musical snuffbox with a clasp garnished with emeralds and brilliants, the Dey looked at it and asked if the English king ‘took him for a child to be pleased with the ting ting thing!’ – although as Broughton observed, the ting ting thing had cost fifteen hundred pounds.

  The corsairs took sobriquets in Old Sabar, the Latinate lingua franca of the Mediterranean, which stank of wickedness and the frisky plank. Among them were Mortamama, whose name hinted at hideous crimes, with his agonising ‘fistula in ano’ and so fat that his only exercise was the rolling of his ship; and Barbarossa’s henchman, Cacca Diabolo. The Danube fleet was well captained in the 1690s when Mezzomorto (‘Halfdead’) Kara Huseyn Pasha was seconded there from a Mediterranean command. Barbarossa, a buccaneering showman even in his sixty-seventh year when he brought his gala fleet up the Golden Horn and into the Sultan’s service, did not have a red beard at all, but lifted the name from his elder brother, who had been a promising young pirate himself before his death.

  In 1534 Barbarossa was made Kapudan Pasha, and he brought to the Ottoman world, weighed down by thoughts of Hungary and Persia, a huge new range. With a fleet of eighty-four ships, sixty-one of them new built at the Arsenal, he set sail for the Italian coast, where he made strenuous efforts to abduct Julia Gonzaga, the beauty of her day, for service in the Sultan’s harem. His galleys were black, and low-lying, so that they might lie invisibly out at sea, waiting for nightfall to make a surprise attack on the coast. Barbarossa landed his men stealthily in the night, and raided Fondi, where the lady was asleep. That very night she was plucked to safety in her negligee by an Italian cavalier, who managed to gallop her out of the city.*

  In 1543 Barbarossa sailed for Toulon with the fleet. The war against Charles V, who constantly eluded Suleyman on land (although, as Suleyman tartly observed, ‘the provinces of kings are as their very wives, and if these are left by their fugitive husbands as a prey to foreigners, it is an extraordinary and a disgraceful thing’) could now be carried into the western Mediterranean. Thanks to Barbarossa, the southern coasts were already under Ottoman sway; and Charles’s disastrous failure to seize Tunis opened up an excellent opportunity for revenge.

  The alliance between France and the Porte against the Habsburgs, which was always vague on land, became a reality at sea. Barbarossa had been looking for a western base in which to winter his fleet. The French evacuated the city of Toulon, the Turks marched in, and in a trice, said a visitor, it looked like an oriental city, complete with mosques. Some say the inhabitants eventually returned to find their homes intact; others say Toulon was pillaged,† and certainly the King of France granted the Toulonese ten years’ tax freedom.

  On the return voyage to Istanbul, Barbarossa ravaged the coasts of Italy, with a fleet of eighty galleys, holding 1,000 spahis and 6,000 janissaries, as well as various French officers and an English doctor, Alban Hill. Barbarossa’s first task was to assist the French in the reduction of Nice: an operation which taught him contempt of the French navy. No resistance was made to a landing at Elba; Orbetello was taken, with the loss of five lives, and a harvest of 140 slaves. At Giglio, 30 Turks were killed but the city’s notables were beheaded and 632 prisoners chained. Ischia was wasted, for 2,040 prisoners. Lipari was tough, and it took almost a fortnight, at the cost of 343 lives, to take the town; but it provided 10,000 slaves, and after it had been stripped of all booty it was burnt, and the elderly had their gallstones removed, to make into charms. At Reggio, Barbarossa bargained for his prisoners’ ransom. The fleet put in at the Venetian port of Zante for supplies, and then sailed back to the Bosphorus.

  As long as Barbarossa led the fleet, victory followed victory. But he died in 1546 and the naval supremacy of the Turks succumbed, in the same century, to the cost and waste. When the great battle of Lepanto was fought, in 1571, it looked like a splendid victory for the West – the first of any magnitude that Christendom had ever won. In practice, it was nobody’s victory. The Christians were quite incapable of following up the blow, and the Ottomans were perfectly capable of restoring their fleet. ‘There is a great difference between our loss and yours. You have shaved our chin; but our beard is growing again. We have lopped off your arm, and you can never replace it,’ the Grand Vizier told the Venetians, when after Lepanto they sued for peace. The Arsenal worked overtime that winter, and the following year a whole new fleet, built from a forest of Pontic timber, was launched to the Christians’ consternation. So fast did the Turks recover, in fact, that a sort of titter ran round Europe at the Emperor’s expense.

  The huge expense of naval wars, with so little to show for it, made both sides wary of engagements after Lepanto; and the Mediterranean galleys were no match for the gigantic Dutch and English ships fitted up for the Atlantic. In 1607 Sir Thomas Sherley said that an English warship could defeat ten Turkish galleys; and the Ottomans, who had always so carefully followed innovations in the Mediterranean – even careening prize ships in the Arsenal – moved very slowly into the age of galleons. They were afraid of the monstrous taxes that would have to be raised to fit out a first-rate fleet capable of tackling Christendom, for adventures merely Mediterranean.

  So with few exceptions the history of the Ottoman navy is one of accelerated decline. Warships rotted in the Arsenal, for lack of funds and knowledgeable crew. Only the corsairs understood the sea, and they preferred to work independently rather than nail their colours to the falling mast. As a result the Ottomans suffered sudden rude shocks. The Black Sea was never really a lake, Ottoman or otherwise; and Cossacks raided Sinope in 1614.In 1654, through a mixture of bungling and bad luck, the Ottomans were blockaded in the Dardanelles by Venice. In 1787 they were thunderstruck by the arrival of a Russian fleet off Greece which had not come through the Bosphorus – and so ignorant of geography that they sternly rebuked the Venetians for allowing the fleet to slip through, via, as they supposed, a secret channel to the Adriatic.

  * For a reverse incident, see footnote on page 226, on Padre Ottomano.

  * She had him murdered for the impropriety.

  † And pillaged, too, on account of the very poor biscuit the French provided, which prompted Barbarossa to demand fresh corn.

  12

  Rhythms

  An Ottoman was not born, but made, passing through the imperial schools, following the requisite course of studies, learning obedience and a language so hi-falutin that nobody else could speak it; a language which could elegantly express every nuance of meaning, every shade of emphasis in single words, but which lacked a word for ‘interesting’. Amusing, astonishing, useful, important – all these qualities they recognised; but there were no grey states of mind. As the cosmos between heaven and earth, so the visible world was split between the Abode of Peace, Dar ul-Islam, and the Abode of War, Dar ul-Harb. The Lord of the Horizon, Burgrave of the World, was also Sultan of the Two Continents, Emperor of the Black Sea and the White, the shadow of God in this world and the next, the Favourite of God on the Two Horizons. Two imaginary characters, Husein and Hasan (like the shadow puppets Karagoz and Hacivet), clarified Ottoman law. Anyone could go to a mullah well versed in Koranic law and present him with a purely hypothetical case concerning Husein and Hasan. The mullah’s response, his fatwa, was either Yes or No, and on the strength of it the plaintiff might proceed to court, or not. When the war against the Persians was at its height, the Chief Mufti was asked whether the death of a single heretic was worthy in the same degree as the death of seventy Christians; and the Mufti, after calculations, thought it was. Ottoman poetry was written in couplets. The Ottoman home was divided between harem and selamlik
(and in the late nineteenth century between western and oriental styles, with grandfather clocks in the hall, robes and sofas in the interior). Ottoman people were either reaya, flock, or servants of the state; and the historians have generally seen Ottoman dominion divided, very neatly, between the Muslim Institution of the law, and the Slave Institution of the administration.

  But the puppets Karagoz and Hacivet depend on the third, rogue, element for their comedies: a gaggle of ladies, the unworldly Sufi, a blustering janissary, or a Frank. When Dmitri Cantemir* wrote up Ottoman history in the eighteenth century, he perceived it as a parabola, an arch which sprang from victory to defeat; and in an empire’s rise and fall, each curve sustains that murky force, or stress, where seeds of failure are sown in the midst of triumph, and some of the lineaments of greatness survive in the ignominy of defeat.

  That graceful curve was not only drawn through Ottoman history, but streamlined every area of Ottoman life. A sixteenth-century ambassador from Germany was so impressed by the modest gravity of Ottoman dress, which fell in graceful folds like the mantles of the ancients, that he began to dread going out in a puff-waisted doublet and his knobbly hose. Over ‘the arch of our sabres’, one pasha was pleased to report, enemies ‘leaped into the abyss of defeat’. Ottoman script was cursive, and Ottoman mustachios were twirled; their swords were curved, their symbol of faith a crescent moon; their public baths and mosques were domed, and often round as well; and a woman – or a page – was a beauty whose eyebrows arched like twin bows (all the lovelier if she swayed as she walked, like a goose, as the Serbians said approvingly). It is said that Ottoman builders never used a plumbline. The janissaries formed a standing army with uniforms and marching bands long before such things were thought of in the West. But they never marched in step, the roads were much too bad, and they had a special swaying walk instead, like models, or sailors.