Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  Each new sultan affected to act as if his predecessor had bequeathed him nothing. He bought the troops anew, with an accession donative. He sent away the old harem and imported his own; and he executed those playmates of his early youth, his brothers, leaving him with no male relatives but his own sons. He ratified laws and treaties as if they had never been ratified before, and a fresh census, as complete as the Domesday Book, but bigger, was made of dues and obligations. (Portents were expected at this time. In 1574 Murad III, making his first remark as Sultan, said ‘I am hungry – let me have something to eat.’ It could only mean famine. Murad was superstitious himself. On the morning of 16 January 1595 he was perturbed by his musicians playing the tune to a song whose first line he was prompted to murmur: ‘Come and keep watch by me tonight, O Death!’; later that day he died of shock when a pane of glass was shattered by the noisy salute of Egyptian ships sailing into harbour – such was the intolerable tension which Mehmet and Suleyman bequeathed to their successors in the silent court.)

  Between one sultan’s death and the girding of the next, ambitions and jealousies locked into a framework of devotion and obedience came tumbling out like stones from a capless arch, and it was flat noon, the moment of misrule and devilry in the state. Those privy to the old Sultan’s death strove to keep the news secret while they sent word to the favoured heir – for succession was one area in which Islam refused to legislate. ‘Princes will follow me: render them your obedience,’ the Prophet said; but it left the details to the imagination. Turkic tradition was no help, either, because it was clan based, awarding hereditary power, if at all, to whole families. With power as ruthlessly individual as the Ottoman, such traditions added up to nothing more than a weaselly injunction to let the best man win.

  In a period which would be short, decisive, and end in blood, people were deft about it, urged on by anxiety. In 1421 Mehmet I’s corpse was propped up in a litter and presented to the suspicious troops; the masterstroke was to make the Sultan gravely stroke his beard, while under the litter a cunning official worked the dead man’s arm with a concoction of gears and string. The sons of a reigning sultan jockeyed for governorships as close as possible to Constantinople; a prince given a province far from the centre knew that his chances of succeeding were slim and prepared, as best he could, to save his own life; Cihangir, Suleyman the Magnificent’s crippled child, went mad when he heard how Suleyman had executed his brother in 1553. ‘Let those who love me, follow me!’ cried Mehmet when he received the news of his father’s death; while on his death in 1481 there was jubilation at Manisa, where his son Bayezit had established a gloomy and reverent court, so opposed to Mehmet’s statist policies that it was supposed Bayezit had poisoned him.

  Bayezit II took seventy days to seize control of Constantinople. The soldiers admired his brother, Cem. Bayezit loved Cem, too, but ‘a sultan knows no blood relations’, he said; and, to his brother’s proposal that they divide the empire between them, he replied: ‘Empire is a bride whose favours cannot be shared.’ From Mameluke Egypt Cem led an abortive invasion in 1482. In desperation he appealed to the Knights of Rhodes to carry him into Europe, to try a rebellion there. The scheme was accepted by the knights, and Cem was ferried to Rhodes with a small retinue of some thirty men. He promised the knights an advantageous treaty in the event of his becoming Sultan, but Bayezit offered them more – peace, free trade and 45,000 ducats a year, ostensibly for his brother’s maintenance. It became impossible then for the knights to give Cem up. Supposedly for his own safety he was carried to Nice, which he admired, all the while expressing his urgent desire to travel on, into Rumelia. Being on French territory, he was told, he should visit the King; but the messenger he sent to arrange the meeting was at last tactfully given up for dead. A plague in Nice gave the knights the excuse they had sought to move their royal prize to one of their inland commanderies, detaching him from his retinue; first Roussillon, then le Puy, then Sassenage, where he fell in love with the commander’s daughter, Philippine Helena, and wrote a lament:

  Ah, for the time when my star rode triumphant, good-fortune its mount,

  Keeping abreast with the dream of your fleetly elusive embrace! …

  Ah, for the time when your threshold was residence, also, for Cem!

  How good a time it was we never knew until lost without trace.

  The knights had meanwhile built a special tower for Cem, seven storeys high, where he might languish above the kitchens and the servants, and beneath the guards. He begged for freedom and attempted to escape; while the knights milked his brother, and even managed to extract 20,000 ducats more from his wife and mother, living in Cairo, with the promise of his imminent release.

  In 1489 the knights struck a deal with the King of France and the Pope. The Grand Master was made a cardinal. Cem was brought to Rome; saluted the Pope with a kiss on the shoulder, like a cardinal, and had an interview with Innocent VIII which reduced the pontiff to tears. Cem soon discovered how his family in Cairo had been tricked. An Ottoman ambassador arrived with various relics of the Crucifixion, and negotiated a 40,000 ducat pension to be paid to the Pope. Innocent was succeeded by Alexander Borgia, who sent the only ever papal ambassador to the Ottoman court, and got the 40,000 ducats continued, as well as a promise of 300,000 ducats as a one-off payment if Cem should die; but he also took a shine to his captive and would dress up a la turque, and ride about Rome with him. In 1495 Charles VIII took Rome; Borgia took Cem with him into the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Negotiations followed; Cem was transferred and taken by Charles to the siege of Naples. Borgia, bilked of his income, opted for the second option; and the deed was done, so the story goes, by a Greek renegade acting as Cem’s barber, who nicked him with a poisoned razor, and much later became Grand Vizier. It is striking how gingerly Bayezit II had set to work as long as the possibility of a rival had existed; even the excellent position the army had secured for itself in southern Italy, at Otranto, had to be abandoned when Bayezit recalled Ahmet Keduk to defeat his brother. But when Cem died at thirty-six, after thirteen years’ captivity, his body was returned to Bursa for burial, with all due pomp; and Bayezit ruled more easily, and began a war with Venice.*

  The elevation of a new sultan returned the empire to its cyclical patterns. The state had withered and died in the winter of the interregnum; the arrival of a new sultan, steered by the hand of God through all its dangers and alarms, signalled the return of spring.

  ‘In divan poetry,’ wrote a Turkish critic in 1932, ‘nature has the lack of perspective of a Persian miniature. Trees cling to man, birds to the sky. There is no wind, and everything seemes frozen.’

  Out went the armies. Up went the nomads to the hills. Fleets cruised on the seas, caravans wended their way across the sands, the peasants sowed and reaped, and in the palace grave old men ran lightly to and fro, on stockinged feet, like boys.

  * Evliya delightfully encapsulates the contempt for time which infused the Ottoman world. An indefatigable traveller, scholar and musician, he wrote a book with more than a whiff of Tristram Shandy (including a description of his own birth), mingled with reportage, fantasy, political diatribes, and personal recollections: chapter CCCLXX sprawls across sixty-two folios, or several hundred pages of print. His sweet singing voice caught the attention of Murad III, but he saw no urgency to get on and chose to go travelling instead, in a world he revealed to be crammed with dreams and miracles, glimpses taken across the rings of time.

  * On the way home, though, he cheered up his janissaries by feeding them zabaglione, after which they promised to carry him to Buda if necessary.

  * The odour of sanctity never left Bayezit, though. His son and successor, Selim the Grim, once commented on a portrait of him in the Marble Kiosk on Seraglio Point, in Constantinople. The painter, he said, ‘has not been able to capture his likeness. The deceased used to make us sit on his blessed lap in our childhood; his noble countenance is still in our memory: he was falcon-nosed.’ Strange words from a sultan whos
e martial valour so appealed to the troops that he was able to depose his father, and then poison him.

  14

  Stalemate

  Suleyman ruled for forty-seven years, and thirty of them he spent on campaign, tireless and resolute, plodding from one project to the next – Egypt and the Rhodes trouble, Belgrade and Hungary, Tabriz, Baghdad, Vienna. ‘What! Suleyman still here? What a drag!’ wrote the Christian-born poet Yaga Beg, successfully chancing his reputation on very thin ice; and the soldiers, too, grew tired of their leader in his later years. On the Persian front in 1553 the army was murmuring that the Sultan was too old to march – he was fifty-nine. The soldiers wanted to make Suleyman’s eldest son Sultan. Suleyman invited Mustafa to his tent, and had him strangled there.

  But in gobbets of Balkan mud, and in the smouldering deserts of Iran time began to establish its dominion over his empire. These were regions a sultan could not cross before his army chafed to be home again for harvest. Suleyman ventured out from Edirne or Bursa year after year with an army larger than any he had amassed before, his grandeur concealing intimations of decline, his reign a feast of ambiguous victories.

  Suleyman’s last campaign in 1566 proved little more than a monstrous razzia into Austrian-held territory, for his enemies eluded him, as ever. The Ottoman army spent ninety-seven days on the march before besieging Szigeth. On 7 September 1566 Suleyman died among his troops, in the midst of a siege, in his campaign tent pitched in the mud of Hungary. His Grand Vizier concealed his death from the army and brought the siege to its successful conclusion. The body was embalmed, dressed, and propped up in the litter as if it were alive until the army was almost home. Meanwhile messengers started from the camp to reach Suleyman’s surviving son, Selim.

  The poet Baki, who had been the Sultan’s friend and correspondent, mourned:

  That master rider of the realm of bliss

  For whose careering steed the field of the world was narrow.

  The infidels of Hungary bowed their heads to the temper of his blade,

  The Frank admired the grain of his sword.

  He laid his face to the ground, graciously, like a fresh rose petal,

  The treasurer of time put him in the coffer, like a jewel.

  The treasurer of time was measuring up the Ottoman Empire, too. The three great Mediterranean powers, Venice, Spain, and the empire itself, all soon toppled into a decline as protracted as it was profound, and a note of exhaustion stole across the whole Mediterranean world. The Venetians heard it, sung softly at dusk beneath the Venetian Rector’s window in Split, ‘a song on everyone’s lips … and it says in this song that the Turk is running water that erodes, and that the Doge is a sandbank which has been carried away little by little by the river.’

  In 1570 Suleyman’s old Grand Vizier, Sokullu Mehmet, took the island of Cyprus for the worthless Selim, who died in 1574. It was much against his better judgement, for Sokullu believed that the empire was tired, and needed a period of caution and repose; but an attack on Venetian Cyprus was the price he paid to hang onto power. It proved to be a turning-point for the empire.

  There was nothing wonderful about the Turks having a crack at Cyprus. It rounded off their control of the eastern Mediterranean; it swept out a nest or two of pirates. The Greeks of Cyprus welcomed the invaders, as Greek islanders frequently did. Fifty thousand Turks died in the effort to capture Fermagusta; but Ottoman wars were traditionally free with lives. The Venetian commander Bragadino, surrendering at last with full military honours and guarantees of safe-conduct for his troops, was treacherously seized, horribly mangled, and at last flayed alive; the Turkish fleet returned to Constantinople in triumph with his skin stuffed with straw and hanging from a yard arm. It was a gruesome but not unprecedented end, and the Turks had no monopoly on the manner of it.

  What distinguished the Ottoman assault from preceding adventures of the kind was the world’s reaction. The attack was perceived, on all sides, as an unwarranted disturbance, as though Turkish conquest was no longer something to be expected but an outrageous upheaval in the natural order. The impetus for the attack was certainly all wrong – the whim of a drunkard, egged on by a Jew, said the western powers bitterly – and it was steeped in palace intrigue. Sultan Selim, the Sot, had a passion for Cyprus wine; his boon companion, Joseph Nasi, a refugee from Spain who had become the court banker, and who as Duke of Naxos was the first Jew to be ennobled for over a thousand years, even hoped to turn Cyprus into a homeland for Jewish refugees from Europe; but to Selim he suggested that the toper should master the source of his good cheer. New powers, too, could be seen stirring in the palace now. Suleyman’s marriage to Roxelana brought the Sultan’s harem out of the Old Palace and into his private apartments in Topkapi, opening a period of harem influence, the so-called Sultanate of the Women, which was to endure until the 1650s and introduced all sorts of political cross-currents into the management of imperial affairs. Don Joseph’s case for Cyprus was supported from the harem by the Jewish-born Nur Banu Sultan, mother of the future Murad III. It was opposed by Selim’s Venetian-born wife, Safiye Sultan.

  Cyprus fell, and the drunkard got his wine tax-free. But new powers were stirring in the West. The fall of Cyprus prompted the formation of a Holy League against the Ottomans. Spain, Venice, the Knights of Malta, and various Italian states under the lead of the papacy, put together a fleet under the command of Don Juan of Austria, a bastard son of Charles V. On 7 October 1571 he sighted the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Lepanto, and moved to the attack.

  Sokullu Mehmet Pasha possessed superlative powers of imagination, brilliant sources of intelligence, and excellent maps, out of which he concocted a plan to maintain the momentum of Ottoman conquest. His intention was to dig a canal to link the Black Sea and the Caspian, over territories increasingly troubled by Russian Cossack raids. Here the Don and the Volga converge as they flow south over hundreds of miles, until a mere thirty miles divide them as they each turn and debouch into their separate seas. Had the Ottomans been able to launch a fleet through the canal and into the Caspian, they could have struck at Tabriz, the Persian capital, from its rear, avoiding the miserable overland approach through the arid mountains of Upper Armenia and Azerbaijan; gained direct access to the Silk Road from Central Asia for themselves; and erected a barricade against Russian and Cossack encroachments from the north-east, just as the Danube had formed their breastwork in the north-west. Dig the canal, open the Caspian to Ottoman ships and arms, and with a bound the empire might be free.

  European discoveries were turning the eastern Mediterranean into a backwater, and the lines of trade and wealth which had lately converged on Constantinople now seemed to be moving away. At the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had discovered the route to the Indies round the Cape: they began trading straight away, bringing peppercorns to Europe in bulk, and cheap. Soon they had added silk, calicoes, and all kinds of spices to their cargoes, directly challenging the ancient caravan routes through the Middle East. The effect on the empire’s revenues was not immediate, and coffee even substituted for spice in the Cairo trade. In the East itself, while some rulers had of course been delighted to see the Portuguese, others felt threatened and petitioned the empire to do something about it. In 1552 a naval expedition, under Piri Reis, had entered the Red Sea and driven the infidels, with difficulty, back to the mouth of the Persian Gulf; but the Portuguese still throttled off the Egyptian trade routes. (In the seventeenth century the establishment of Dutch and British power in Asia, and their decisive redirection of trade routes to the open ocean, was to deprive Turkey of most of her foreign commerce. In London ‘nabobs’ replaced ‘pashas’ as objects of envy and derision.) In 1580 Murad III was advised by a geographer to dig a Suez canal and ‘capture the ports of Hind and Sind and drive away the infidels’. The Suez project never got beyond the planning stage, for the region was engulfed by a rebellion.

  Work began on the Caspian canal, though, in the spring of 1570. Ten thousand troops,
and 6,000 labourers, assembled at Kaffa in the Crimea; munitions and supplies were stockpiled at Azov; 500 men led the artillery up the Don and made camp at Perekop. Digging did not begin before the end of August. The Khan of the Crimean Tartars, Devlet Giray, sent 3,000 riders as guards and guides – not many, given the hordes at his control; they proved rather demoralising, describing to the Turkish troops the impossibility of righteous men surviving a Russian summer, when the sun never truly set, and the first and last prayer of the day could never be said. He withdrew them when progress on the canal began to be made. Almost a third had been dug by October, when the fierce steppe winds and the cold nights descended, and the general, ‘Circassian’ Kasim Pasha, broke off to secure the region for the spring, and better weather. One part of his force he sent to Astrakhan, to hold the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian; another he sent back to Azov, where the Don pours into the little sea of that name. The assault on Astrakhan, which was still held by the Russians, was repulsed by a sally; the troops at Azov were surprised by a small Russian army, the supplies went up in flames, and the Russians took their first Turkish war trophies. Disobeying orders, Kasim Pasha abandoned the whole ill-fated enterprise, and embarked his troops; but the flotilla was assailed by storms, and only 7,000 men returned to Istanbul. It seems that the border guards, the Crimean Tartars, preferred to keep their enemies to themselves; and a year after the Ottomans withdrew they demonstrated their own ability in superb style, riding through to Moscow and firing the city, herding 200,000 captives back to Azov.

  Distant Lepanto in 1571 brought the Ottomans a defeat which ruled out a return to the steppe. It was the largest battle ever waged in the Mediterranean – 487 ships took part, and 200 of the 245 Turkish ships were sunk. It was the first major defeat the Ottomans had suffered in two centuries, and was remembered by Cervantes, who took part in the battle, as ‘that day so fortunate to Christendom, when all nations were undeceived of their error in believing that the Turks were invincible’. Depictions of the day became a stock-in-trade of western painters, and even G. K. Chesterton wrote a rousing poem about it 350 years later. But it was only the insults which remained full-rigged when the smoke of battle had cleared away; and the sheer costs of the engagement, to both sides, signalled an end to the struggle for the Mediterranean.