Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  Ipsir Mustafa Pasha, governor of Aleppo, was offered the grand vizierate in 1651. Local rebellions, he replied, made it impossible for him to leave his post. ‘I have mustered 40,000 musketeers,’ he assured the Porte. ‘I am prepared to come with this company and to rub my face on the Imperial Threshold.’ The Imperial Threshold was not sure whether this rubbing would be quite what it liked; but still Ipsir Mustafa Pasha delayed, reluctant to exchange his quasi-independent position for the uncertainties of palace life, and suspicious of the motives that lay behind his summons. When he finally came to negotiate terms and sound out the mood of the city, he covered his approach with the support of an army of ‘seasoned warriors, fully armed and accoutred, from the lands of the Arabs and the Turks and the Kurds, each one a walking armoury, uppity Segban and Sarica vermin, clad in mail and armour and helmets and link-mail neckbands and shields and felts, each one having ready in his hands and at his waist five or six double-barrelled lead-shot muskets with double wick, like so many salamanders in Nimrod’s fire, marching in close formation and brandishing their weapons as though they were entering a skirmish. The Istanbul troops shook like Autumn leaves.’

  The biographies of most seventeenth-century pashas make for sombre reading. The kul suffered from overcrowding, like everyone and everything else: between 1640 and 1656 the numbers of salaried officials jumped from 60,000 to 100,000. One Omar Pasha, for example, spent two years waiting for a new post, maintaining the retinue which his rank demanded by borrowing money from his sister. Two jobs were offered to him in this period, but in each case the incumbent refused to budge. A war, in which he and his retinue were bound to participate, sent his debts soaring. He desperately needed a job, with the chance to recoup his losses. Once again, the pasha he was detailed to relieve was in no mood to change places with him. A battle had to be fought, and Omar died in it. The victor made his apologies to the Porte, regretted the confusion, and hung onto his job. Survivors like him became rich, larded with gifts, so that the higher echelons of government were choked with presents and finery and officials laid their hands, in desperation, on any available source of revenue. Men lower down were pushed to the bottom of the heap. ‘No one can afford the old establishments,’ lamented one memorialist.

  Inflation was much to blame. It first arrived in 1584, stealing in with American silver which the Genoese first brought into the eastern Mediterranean. Spanish-American silver undermined the value of the currency in Genoa in 1580, and in Ragusa soon after. Its effects were particularly severe in the Ottoman world because the lunar metal silver, not gold, was the standard measure of value; one of its effects was to make Ottoman gold seem ludicrously cheap, so that bullion ships began clustering round the Horn, putting in cheap reals in return for gold.

  In Suleyman’s day the soldiers received their pay by weight, so that no one cared if the coin itself was clipped or light. More astonishingly they received it, Busbecq said, ‘not on the day it falls due but on the day previous’. In the 1590s they began to experience arrears, as did thousands of salaried functionaries, palace men, and provincial bureaucrats, clerks and kadis. Corruption and the habit of selling every service rose. The Ottomans’ little silver asper had remained remarkably stable in value for most of the sixteenth century – 58 aspers bought one gold coin in 1507, 62 in 1589. But by 1600 this ‘gypsy money’, or ‘tavern money’, stood at around 280 aspers to gold. By then the fiscal premise on which a long view of time could be supported, the security of knowing that, as the empire grew, so it would get richer every day, had been completely overturned, and the calm, self-regulating pattern of Ottoman life, with all its felicitious connections and dependencies, the little springs and triggers which ensured that the entire mechanism pulled in a single direction, was thrown into disarray. Aspers, said a contemporary Turkish historian, ‘were as light as the leaves on an almond tree and as worthless as dew drops’.

  Money inflation brought inflation of another kind. More and more people sought refuge in state service: if the salary was inadequate, at least every service could be sold. The Venetian bailio kept on hand a list of the bribes he gave palace servants; a register explaining who might receive what in future; and a ragionateria stuffed with potential douceurs – from which one learns that the chief dragoman, or interpreter, had received fifty-six robes, seven picchi of saglia rubin, three watches, two boxes of perfumes, three mirrors, a cooling chest, a silver chocolate service, three glass cabinets, fifty pieces of glass, glass for twenty windows, twelve locks, four canaries, fruit, vegetables, Piacenza cheese, chocolate, candy, and miscellaneous articles.

  It was as if the men in power had peeped into that register for themselves, too, for they were perfectly aware of their own value, and not afraid to complain if the douceur was the wrong colour, or too short, or (worse of all) less valuable than the last. When the Reis Effendi (a sort of foreign minister) chose to lament that he had not yet had the pleasure of wearing one of the fine Venetian gold capes he had heard so much about, he was sure to receive the very thing later that afternoon. The Venetians fretted at the escalating expense, and despaired, like the incorrigible cost analysts they were, of getting value for money. ‘In Constantinople,’ a bailio complained, ‘one has to lavish respects and favours on everyone, even on the marioli [Cretan adventurers rounded up in taverns for the Ottoman navy] because there is a perpetual wheel of fortune that the Signor causes to rise and fall according to the spins of his caprice.’

  Shake-ups were profitable for office sellers, ultimately located in this period in the harem, under the control of the Chief Black Eunuch. The ceremonious order of the empire which turned like the heavens became jerky and confused. Sultans had once ruled seven, eleven, twenty years but now averaged only five or six. In the Principalities, the Hospodars were rolled over every year, rather than every three.

  The terrible period which signalled the apogee of the Sultanate of the Women, between 1644 and 1656, saw eighteen grand viziers (four were executed, eleven dismissed, two resigned and one died naturally); twelve sheikh ul-Islams, and eighteen kapudan pashas. The old system of maintaining retinues concomitant with rank made the turmoil all the fiercer, for each high official had a shoal of small fry to put into place; and they worked hard to advance themselves, by any means,* since their terms of office seemed likely to be short.

  As never before the Ottomans learned to watch the clock, mesmerised by the inexorable passage of time. Ottoman technology never advanced beyond the water clock, but European clocks began to exert a fatal fascination over all classes of society.

  It was whispered that the very same Grand Mufti who first learned to flee the plague, and fate, ‘much delighteth in clocks and watches, whereof, as some say, he hath not so few as a thousand’. Ornate clocks, gilded, golden, machicolated, glazed, but always replete with curious movements, such as buglers blowing and lions raging, were carried by well-advised ambassadors as gifts for pashas. A century later Prince Ypsilanti, one of the Phanariot aristocracy who claimed descent from the Byzantine emperors through the female line, crammed his saloon with two hundred clocks, eighty of them grandfather clocks – western visitors sniggered, a bit uneasily, when they were ushered in. One ambassador heading for Istanbul in 1599 with his suite of attendants was held up for a day while his jeweller was taken back to Nis to fix a clock ‘shaped like a Turkish turban, upon which stood a chamois, which turned its eyes backwards and forwards, and when the hour struck pawed with its foot and opened its mouth, and under this gilt serpents and scorpions twisted about’. It was a clock the ambassador had presented to the Beylerbey of Greece in Nis the day before; and the pasha had madly overwound it, as if trying to squeeze more time out of it.

  The end of the sixteenth century had brought the so-called Long War, with Austria. Time was also short for the army, the backbone of the Ottoman enterprise. Gone were the days when the Ottoman cavalry surging up the passes and thundering across the plains of south-east Europe could demolish the chivalry of nations they invaded a
t a stroke. The wilder horsemen might still spread devastation far and wide, and gather slaves; and the Tartars still performed their horrid loop from home, riding out with incredible speed, driving harmlessly but deep into enemy territory before suddenly wheeling about to loot and burn and put their enemies to death on the long ride back. But Ottoman armies as a whole could scarcely reach the borderlands within the campaign season. The enemy retired to their strongholds, and each small advance meant reducing fortresses, one by one, and returning the fire of those monstrously accoutred, grimly expert musketeers, whose job it was to hold them.

  Warfare became a drag. The so-called Long War with Austria, at the end of the sixteenth century, was seemingly unwinnable. Back and forth the armies marched across Hungary, year after year, with thrust and counter-thrust, sieges and sallies. Finally exhaustion overwhelmed the combatants, and the long war was concluded with a hasty peace, clapped up there and then on the field at Szitvarok in 1606, leaving matters standing much as they were before the war began.

  But there was a crucial difference. The Ottomans traditionally dealt with supplicant ambassadors to the Sultan’s court, where they could grant peace as a favour, and generally in return for tribute. At Szitvarok, exhausted, they were forced to drop their guard, and admit the Emperor of Austria as an equal. Inscribing the Emperor’s title and claims upon the treaty document was tantamount to an admission of defeat. The ideal of a universal commonwealth was put aside, for sovereignty of this earth was divided, after all; and with that shattering admission the great old conductors of imperial affairs seemed to take their place, very humbly, in the concert of European diplomacy.

  The armies had grown with every passing year: Mehmed the Conqueror’s 10,000 spahi had become almost 30,000 by Suleyman’s day. The janissary rolls leaped from five to twenty-five thousand men. Fighting on frontiers far from the home base, the empire had less call for horsemen. It needed infantry and sappers and artillerymen, trained at barracks, not scattered through the empire like the spahis. Instead of rewarding men with fiefs, and seeing that they were parcelled out with care, the treasury had to find cash to pay the wages of men who spent half the year in barracks. By 1595, it was paying 48,000 soldiers. By 1652 the number had doubled to 85,000.

  The swelling wage bill put enormous strain on the finances of the empire at a time when the rewards of constant warfare were beginning to dry up. No new timars were being conquered for the spahis, no new sources of revenue discovered with which to pay the janissaries. The Treasury’s accounting system had been established in those centuries of conquest and success when the Ottomans had scorned to count the hours. Salaries, traditionally, were paid out by the lunar year of 354 days. But the taxes – largely agrarian, raised from the sale of harvest crops – came in seasonally, or according to the solar calendar. Between the money coming in and the salaries going out, the Treasury faced a shortfall of eleven days each year: or every thirty-two income years the state undertook to pay thirty-three annual salaries. Some historians have seen this cycle as the base-note of unrest in the empire, as the Ottomans were driven to extraordinary levies and expedients to bridge the gap – many of which, having been tried once, became permanent burdens on the people.

  The simplest answer to the problem of raising cash was to use timars as a source of tax, instead of men; but the social consequences of undermining the old system proved disastrous, triggering a vicious circle of discontent. Many timariots, disgruntled and insecure, began to regard the state as a threat, rather than the be-all and end-all of their existence. Failing to be promoted, finding their children unprovided for, they moved into the cities, or took to the highways. Brigandage spread, for men who might have hoped to win their spurs on the borderlands had nowhere to go, and in the early seventeenth century all Anatolia was engulfed in rebellions, known as Celali revolts.

  Rarely, however, did they join forces with the janissaries, who were undergoing difficulties of their own. The janissaries loathed the cavalry, Rycaut’s ‘gentry of the Ottoman Empire’. The janissaries were conscious of their standing as the Sultan’s permanent army. Every regiment, originally, was autonomous, in order to operate neatly in the field: each had its cooks, bakers, tailors, padre, tent-makers, and so on. They performed various crucial tasks in the off-season: they put out fires, they patrolled the streets, and supplied the city with two corps of detectives, credited with a remarkably good success rate, and especially skilled at recovering stolen goods through their shadier links with the guild of thieves. For punishment they were beaten on their bottoms, to save their feet for the march: the spahis were bastinadoed, on the feet. The janissaries jeered at the horsemen, and frequently accused them of cowardice; but people laughed at the janissaries for having good eyes and good legs – to spot if the cavalry were wavering, and to run away.

  As early as 1523 they had sought permission to marry. By the end of the century, with families to support, the janissaries’ devalued pay encouraged them to practise their military trades offseason in the civil sphere. Their commanders, enrolling phantom soldiers in the army to increase the payroll, began selling vacant janissary positions to tradesmen and artisans facing janissary competition. More and more janissaries appeared on the books, less and less effective as a fighting force. The old swaggering janissary trooper, proud veteran of countless engagements with the infidel, gave way to the artisan janissary, who feared for his business and his family and hoped never to see a battle in his life, but who enjoyed all his predecessor’s well-earned rewards.

  The state still needed troops equipped with guns, as cheaply as they could be found. Anatolian Muslims, willingly drawn from the distressed countryside, were speedily enrolled in the Ottoman armies, only to be discharged at the end of the season, gun in hand, to support themselves as best they could by brigandry, or in the retinues of provincial governors.

  The janissaries, meanwhile, made the most of their ancient privileges – only a janissary court could judge them, and military authorities have always taken a lenient view of high jinks. As the rewards of war began drying up, legally or otherwise they took what they could at home. They became notorious fire-raisers. Istanbul was a city of wooden buildings always prone to burning, and the janissaries were magnificent extortionists. People paid them not to burn their homes and businesses, then they paid them to come and put the fires out. When the janissaries had to select areas for demolition, as a windbreak, people paid them to create the windbreak somewhere else. And at the end of it all, the janissaries looted the ruined homes. For the janissaries, fire in the city was the sack of Constantinople all over again.

  They were quick to take advantage, slow to appreciate long-term consequences. They were not all buffoons and cowards; some wrote elegant poetry, but their impositions were frequently niggardly, like the tooth rent they demanded for chewing stolen food; and their grand rebellions had all the viciousness and ultimate purposelessness of any peasant uprising. Their demands of the moment were invariably met, and many a pasha, after kissing the hem of the sultanic robe, was to stride out as a sacrifice to the blood-lust of the troop. But they were only the tools of intrigue in the palace, and when a rebellion had run its course its leaders were invariably taken out and slipped into the waters of the Bosphorus at night.

  The janissaries came to feel little more than an oily, self-interested sentimental attachment for the Sultan, their Little Father; and like all such attachments it was dangerous when it was broken. No doubt they blubbed and called the Sultan a good fellow who melted the plate to pay their donative; but woe betide the sultan who failed to provide one. Small wonder that the years 1623–56 have been called the Sultanate of the Agas, the janissary commanders.

  Nobody knew that the borders had closed, or understood that the empire had reached its geographical limit – victories and conquests were still being made and one might expect more to come – yet the chaos demanded an explanation. A traditional view suggested men had shrunk. We like to think that people used to be smaller, but in
the seventeenth century people believed, a little wistfully, the evidence of their own eyes – Pietro della Valle visited the pyramids and concluded from the size of the sarcophagi he found there that they had been raised by a race of giants. Men shook their heads and agreed that no one could draw a bow like the men of old, or nodded sagely at the stele set up on the Atmaidan* in Constantinople, recording incredible feats of hurling the javelin.

  The ulema believed that moral fibre had declined. You had only to look at the markets and bazaars, they said, to see that people were less straight and honest than they had been in the days of the Prophet, when no one had thought of fixing prices by law; if the religious judges undertook the business now, it was only in sorrowful acknowledgement of moral decline. Wherever you looked you might find people behaving badly. Peasants were trying to squeeze their way into the army, a serious challenge to the clear old delineations between warrior and reaya.† Sultans were apparently trying to squeeze out, preferring to chase skirts or go hunting, though it was sultans at the head of their armies who had won the great battles of the past. The janissaries were disobedient. Prices were too high. Too many ne’er-do-wells infested the capital, like the rabble of French soldiers seconded to the Habsburgs who defected in Hungary in 1599 and made trouble in Constantinople: they were put into ships and sent against enemies in the Black Sea, but some returned and had to be dealt with by the ambassador. Too many Jews hung about the palace.

  Too many pashas clung to their offices without permission. And everyone in the bureaucracy could finger someone, or some clique, who put their own interests before the interests of the state, and offered bad advice, and took outrageous bribes. Sokullu Mehmet himself had been guilty of rampant nepotism (though spite is quixotic: his predecessor, Rustem, was nicknamed Louse for cutting his own father).* And because the Ottomans were used to victory, the loss of a battle, or an unfavourable treaty, provoked accusations of incompetence, or treachery.