Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The Chinese had identified the Turks as a people on their borders in the fourth century. For a thousand years they were on the move, learning the nomad’s instinctive reserve – discretion was the surest guarantee of privacy in camp – and to the end the Turks were notorious for gravity, and politesse. If the empire they built became almost legendary in its immobility, in detail it remained in a state of constant graceful movement, its arcs forever being drawn, its flourishes incessantly produced, its white-hatted and mustachioed janissary soldiers, visitors said, magnificently offering you their bouquets.

  Their movement was always economical. Turks never got used to the sight of western merchants pacing up and down in conversation, and one of the greatest of grand viziers, Fazil Ahmet Koprulu, was as well remembered for his queer habit of walking about while sunk in thought, as for his administrative and military genius. Mrs A. J. Harvey found Turkish women amused by westerners constantly raising their top hats, and in her Turkish Harems of 1871 she records this spritely curse: ‘May your fatigued and hated soul find no more rest in purgatory than a Giaour’s hat enjoys on earth!’ And when an Ottoman ambassador to the court of France was introduced to the child King Louis XIII, he was so astonished by Richelieu instructing the boy to run up and down for his guest that for half a moment he could not even speak (but he recovered himself, and winged the incident diplomatically, praising Allah).

  The Ottomans felt the geomancer’s horror of hard lines, dead spaces and sharp angles. For all their bravery on the battlefield, at home they were afraid of dark corners: imps would gather in them, as they did around still water (iron worked, though, and even the word for iron, timur, had some effect when it was shouted into a corner). They built low sofas into the angles of a room, or concealed them with corner cupboards; or even sliced them off, by opening them into doorways, on the slant. For centuries the powerhouse of the empire was known as the divan, where viziers sat cross-legged, handling half a dozen separate matters all at once with perfect fluency; and even in the nineteenth century, when western furniture was the rule, pashas sometimes sat tailor-fashion on their desks, while their underlings squatted on the armchair seats.

  An Ottoman did not particularly like to view all his possessions foursquare around him; he preferred things gathered in bags, slung over a hook* – indeed, anything too flat, or fixed, or straight bore the odour of death, the stamp of the Final Immobility. Ottoman mores considered even direct questions discourteous. When an Ottoman ambassador to a western court was asked how the Turks made love he replied, with a flash of reproachful wit: ‘We do not make love. We purchase it ready-made.’ They avoided straight compliments at all costs, as carrying the jettatura, the Evil Eye. Praise a thing, and as often as not it would be pressed into your hands: for the Eye was on it, and it would only bring bad luck to the owner if it was kept (the glassy blue eyes of Franks were considered especially sinister and malign). ‘There is no colour, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble or feather that has not a verse belonging to it,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu discovered in the early eighteenth century, ‘and you may quarrel, reproach or send letters of passion, friendship or civility, or even of news, without ever inking your fingers.’† When an Ottoman smoked, he reclined with the graceful nargile, which coiled from the lips to the floor – where the clumsy western visitor often trod them underfoot. Even their courtesies were elliptical, as Edward Lear discovered when he apologised for trampling those pipes; for the pasha merely waved a hand. ‘The breaking of such a pipe-bowl would indeed, under ordinary circumstances, be disagreeable,’ he said; ‘but in a friend every action has its charm!’

  ‘There is no past, there is no hereafter, everything is in a process of becoming,’ wrote the Turkish mystic Bedreddin. Mysticism of this sort is a form of practicality. If it were desired that at an Ottoman funeral even the horses should be seen to weep, the Turks could make them weep. They pioneered inoculation. The gardens of the royal palace in Constantinople produced an abundance of vegetables which were sold at market to defray the cost of the Sultan’s food – ‘well acquired moneys,’ Menavino said, ‘and not from the sweat of poor men.’ After one particular massacre in an Italian square they extracted all the gallstones they could find to make a preparation for gout. They considered any shelter sufficient for a traveller, though assiduous in stabling and feeding his horse. In their own houses they seldom allotted rooms a single function. ‘You sit in a room,’ Eliot explained; ‘and when you are hungry you call; a little table is brought in and you eat; when you want to go to bed a pile of rugs is laid in a corner and you go to sleep in it.’ And deep inside the warren of the palace lies a suite of very tiny rooms. Many researchers assumed they were storage. They were the quarters of the palace dwarves.

  Ottomans could, as need arose, bridge a river in spate in record time; bivouac in winter; march on a handful of rice; or unerringly lay their hand upon facts and figures out of an astonishing collection of reports, censuses, registers and surveys. The Ottomans simply bound good laws, when they met them, in with the rest, so that the Ottoman police superintendent of Chios drew his salary from a tax on prostitutes, just as his Genoese predecessor had done. This talent for practical organisation survived the empire’s decline, and must account for its longevity. When the ambassador to Russia in 1775 was fitted out, he took a letter to the Tsarina written on special paper, in special ink. He drew his tent, stores, gifts and dining utensils, his horse tackle and his petty cash, soup ladles and wagon wheels, from the relevant department of the palace, following to the last spoon and pot the example set on record by his predecessor; and he signed them all out on chits.*

  Mostar Bridge

  Probably only an English tea planter, kitting up in the Army and Navy Stores for his first five-year stint in India, could draw so exactly and methodically on the accumulated experience of his forebears.

  Lovely bridges were raised across the empire, like the bridge at Mostar, high-arched and hump-backed, only destroyed in 1993 because for four hundred years it had linked the Muslim with the Christian side of town; or the bridge of Scutari in Albania, which could only be built when a woman had been immured in its foundations, into whose cell a tiny vent was introduced, through which she continued to suckle her infant (in a Vlach version of the story, though, it was the bridge of Arta, and the poor mother was deprived even of her vent). Some bridges were military, like the Danube bridge at Giurgiu, or the massive timber bridge across the Sava marshes at Osijek in Yugoslavia, which was five miles long and supported a string of wooden towers – the gateway into Hungary from the south, on the campaign trail. Others were for trade, like the bridge of Buda, and the bridge for livestock at Vac. In Monastir there were innumerable bridges, some flanked with rows of shops, ‘forming a broad covered bazaar’. Had he never built mosques, Sinan, the greatest architect the Ottomans ever produced, would have been remembered for his bridges. Sultan Suleyman, his patron, nearly drowned while out hunting in the marshes of the Marmara coast in 1563: Sinan flung no less than four bridges from one island to the next across the treacherous estuary at Buyukcekmice, wide enough for caravans to pass each other. Bridges going nowhere at all were flung across steep and broken ground, to provide a level building surface – the entire side of Topkapi facing Istanbul, for instance, is carried on a series of bridges, and at Urfa a street crosses a gulley over high arches. The transverse ravines of the Pontic coast were made passable by teetering rope bridges and breathtaking single arches made of stone, still in use today; and across the empire you find little packhorse bridges without parapets placed on the drovers’ roads, their common horseshoe design humbly expressive of the unity, and utility, of empire.

  The bridge that Ibrahim, in 1526, flung across the Sava in four days, which his engineers had told him would take three months to build, signalled the apogee of the empire – he went on to build a pontoon bridge across the Danube at Buda, too, weighted with the bells of the city churches in all the insolence of victory. When, later that centur
y, a bridge collapsed with fatal consequences just when the pasha of Bosnia was riding over it – to the undisguised amusement of the Austrians, whose derision so offended the Porte that war was only averted by a timely gift of flowers – the existence of a bridge so unsafe could be said to have presaged the empire’s imminent decline, until a day was reached when a traveller, with business in another town, could be told, ‘There are many bridges on that road,’ as a reason for taking another.

  The Ottomans did not burden the world with monuments to their own magnificence, and it is this, perhaps, which makes them seem so distant, as though their empire had flourished many centuries ago, on other continents. Besma Sultan ran out of money for the second minaret on the Yeni Valideh Cammi at the Akseray; and when her son offered her the money to finish it she said, ‘No, one minaret is enough to call the people to prayer, and another would only glorify me; the poor need a fountain.’ You will search in vain for the familiar memorials of empire – for statuary, triumphal arches or obelisks, of the rewards which imperialists tend to discover for themselves – comfy lodgings in up-country stations, sprawling villas on the latifundia, or great country houses lapped by manicured lawns. The palaces of the great were invariably lost in the winding byways of the city, and in the evening of empire the local governor’s konak, or residence, in any Balkan town, was always a sort of barracks, dirty white, where half a dozen irregular-looking men with broken teeth and oily rifles milled about.* Konak described the governor’s residence, but also any ordinary wooden house; and its first meaning was a halt on the caravan route.

  You might conclude that this was a very modest empire, for there was certainly a delicacy, a tact, in the way people provided for themselves. However much an Ottoman city might be admired from afar, on close inspection it generally proved to be a warren of closely packed wooden buildings ‘built on the bare earth’, which in every city in the empire – but especially Istanbul – was regularly swept by plague, and consumed by fire.* ‘If anyone is asked his age,’ said Baron de Tott, a Frenchman who ran an artillery school in Constantinople in the eighteenth century, ‘the answer will always refer to the year of some plague or famine, some rebellion or conflagration’, while Thackeray, who witnessed fifteen major fires in a month in Pera, could only regret that none of them had lasted long enough to oblige the Sultan to attend them in person.

  The eye was drawn to the city from a long way off. The minarets of Sarajevo, it used to be said, could be seen from Bosanski Novi, in the far north-west corner of Bosnia, seventy miles away. In Eger, northern Hungary, the solitary pencil of a minaret rises above a dusty square, shorn of its mosque, its schools, and soup kitchens, but, as anyone there will tell you, it was the northernmost minaret in Europe until modern times. Vlore’s perfect little mosque was sinisterly preserved as a museum of superstition, lonely between the serried blocks of flats of a vanished socialist utopia. In Tirana, which the Ottomans founded, the mosque of Sultan Ahmet graces the corner of the presidential square like a rash of poppies on a building site; its dome within is ablaze with visions of the Bosphorus, and when the imam, in a flat cap and tweed coat, gets you sliding your feet nervously onto the parapet of the minaret, he will murmur the call to prayer confidingly, just to show you how the thing is done.

  It used to be said that Ottoman mosques were journeyman copies of the cathedral erected by Justinian a thousand years earlier, but Ottomans sought light.† The taste for abstractions which the Ottomans brought to the empire’s European regions followed the old invasion route taken by monotheism, by sterner forms of spiritual Christianity, abstract Islam, numerals and alphabets, geometry and algebra, disdain for the gross illusions of the flesh, Platonic ideals of a transcendent universe. Islam had seized upon the work of the early Greek geometricians and algebrists with glee, and made them its own.

  In their mosques, the Ottomans made structural use of the dome and semi-dome, spinning them heavenwards so that the central dome floated upon a cascade of structures which became more slender, numerous and small as they reached the ground, like a fountain rising within from solidity to translucency, and cascading down in a widening shower of droplets. Karoly Kos felt that the silhouette of a mosque could be a reflection of the circular nomadic tent; and one historian took a step further, and claimed to see inside every bare unfurnished mosque a reminder ‘of the vast wastes of the sunlit deserts of Arabia’.

  The tracery filling a mosque window, set with fragments of coloured glass, light and dark marble or stones on the façade, geometric designs carved on the monumental doors, mother-of-pearl inlay, bore the same gift for pattern as armies which sought the imprint of last year’s camp on which to pitch their tents; the carpets of Anatolia, the tiles of Iznik, the maps of Piri Reis,* or the imperial household revolving around the Sultan like stars around the earth. A Circle of Felicity dominated Near-Eastern political thought:

  In order to hold a land one needs troops and men,

  In order to keep troops one must divide out property,

  In order to have property one needs a rich people.

  Only laws create the richness of a people.

  If one of these is lacking all four are lacking:

  If all four are lacking, the dominion goes to pieces.

  Patterns are light, but strong. Tamerlane’s name means approximately ‘man of iron’: but timur was not actually iron itself, rather the quality of hardness which made it so difficult to bend. Most calligraphic inscriptions contained an outer and an inward meaning, to be read by the initiated; and when that historian claimed to see, in every Ottoman mosque, an echo of the sunlit spaces of the steppe, he pointed the way to the inner quality of this empire as it rose to power, and acknowledged the lightness that was its genius. At its heart was the pattern which rose almost to nothingness, the rippling Arabic so abstract that meaning itself was jettisoned, the mantra, repeated towards infinity, which emptied the Sufi’s mind and let it fill with God’s.

  William Biddulph, an English factor in Smyrna in the seventeenth century, once took the trouble to weigh his drinking water, and promptly discovered why it was so good: it was lighter than English water, he said, by four ounces in the pound. Christendom produced, by way of cloth, heavy woollens; the Ottoman Empire gave the world its silk, muslin, and cottons. The Christian nations clamped down hard on trade, and from the sixteenth century their policy of mercantilism, favouring exports and their own ships, grimly made trade a battering ram to riches. The Ottomans freely summoned to their empire all the products of the world.

  The defence of Christendom was an armadillo affair: towering castles, armoured knights, mail, breastplates, maces so heavy they can hardly be lifted with two modern hands. A German mercenary of the sixteenth century might be festooned with bullets and powder horns and bowed beneath his six-foot musket; but Ottoman armies moved like tides, and travelled light, with simple wants and few possessions. The janissaries took to guns, but the spahis baulked at the muskets first tried out on them in Persia in 1556. Their companions derided their horns, pouches, ramrods, and bandoliers, and mocked them as mounted apothecaries; the guns jammed and fell apart, and when they were fired, the discharge covered their beautiful clothes with soot. Before long the spahis were begging for their bows and arrows. Outmoded chivalry, perhaps: but boys spent years learning to flex a light bow, long before they were allowed to draw it, and in the spahi’s hands the bow was more accurate, more manoeuvrable, cleaner, lighter and more effective than the early firearms. Having judged the musket for what it was, they lost interest. The West improved its workings. The spahis ignored it.

  The organisation of western faith was ponderous and hierarchical: Christian divines hunkered in their cells; Christian monks built themselves vast monasteries; and the domes of an Orthodox church can appear earth-bound, clustered like cowpats beside the aspiring minaret. In the East holy men removed themselves so far from the gross world that they sat on pillars for years; or walked on flaming coals. Evliya Celebi describes how a Sufi who
could only have passed bodily through the wall once visited him and the Grand Vizier; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu knew of a teacher who moved with his entire family into the branches of a tree; and the pet holy man of the higher Ottoman ranks was always the Mevlevi ‘whirling’ dervish, whose performance left spectators gasping for breath. ‘The rapidity with which they whisked around became amazing,’ wrote Chandler, who witnessed a performance of the rite in the Athenian Tower of the Winds; ‘their long hair not touching their shoulders, but flying off.’ Afterwards the visitors were given coffee and pipes, with the chief dervish ‘as cool and placid as if he had been only a looker-on’.

  School of dancing

  An enormous amount of the empire’s wealth, and almost a third of its land, found its way out of the tax system altogether, and into charitable foundations. Islam was a powerful provider, and most of the memorials of empire were charitable. Charity, said the poet Jami, was like musk, ‘which may be hidden but is discovered by the grateful odour it diffuses’.

  Bridges were often erected as an act of piety, and maintained by endowments. Endowments, or vakif, were enshrined in Islamic law, and supplied a great range of public services in perpetuity. The sick could get free treatment at the mosque, and the traveller three free nights, with food, in a han, or hostel. The mentally ill – if not kept as the village idiot – were cared for in asylums. When the antiquarian Postel was sent by Louis XIV to seek out old manuscripts in the bazaars he fell on hard times, whereupon the janissaries cordially enrolled him into their mess. Before the seventeenth century at least, foreigners often commented on the absence of beggars; later they had a guild to maintain their position in society like everyone else. Eliot, in the nineteenth century, remembered the legless beggar of Therapia, who saluted passers-by with a graceful bow, and ‘received with the dignity of a courteous tax collector the alms which his persuasive tongue never failed to elicit’. He was said to have become quite rich, and when ambassadors left Therapia at the onset of winter he left, too, taking a first-class ticket to Mitylene, to spend the winter with his eleven blind sisters. Endowments proved, tangentially, to be a useful way for a wealthy man to leave something to his heirs, for every great man could set up some foundation and appoint his heirs as its perpetual guardians, permitted to sustain themselves from its revenues.