Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The government protected such things when it had the power and the wherewithal. ‘Let the man be a reprobate who sells a slave, injures a fruit-bearing tree, and makes lime from chiselled marble,’ was a saying attributed to the Prophet. An Ottoman governor was dismissed in 1759 for blowing up a column in the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens for his mosque; and it was not a Turk but an officer from Lombardy, under a Venetian general, who demolished the Parthenon with a lucky shot, leaving the ruins to be crawled over, tapped at, and transported piecemeal by high-paying Europeans like Lord Elgin. Western tourists in Rhodes were flattered to see, above the lintels of old doorways, the arms of French and German and Italian nobility, for they imagined these had been preserved by the Turks out of respect for the bravery of the Knights; but in fact the Turks seldom bothered to alter what they found, and beyond a little whitewash in the churches they squatted in old buildings in picturesque confusion, and treated palaces and hovels they inherited as practical shelter, with no more thought of repairing or improving a palace than they would a roomy and convenient cave. ‘Whatever castle or fortress they take’, wrote Belon du Mans, ‘remains in the state in which they found it’, the Turk ‘esteeming it an egregious folly’, adds Sandys, ‘to erect sumptious Habitations, as if hee were to live forever’.

  Anatolia, Thrace, Thessaly and Bulgaria were the homelands, long since under Ottoman rule, where Ottoman power was absolute. To the buffer states, the Principalities, Transylvania, Crimea, the Porte contributed nothing more than political legitimacy to vassal rulers in return for warriors and food. Hungary – ever sui generis, since the Magyars settled it in the ninth century and planted the dialect and looks of Central Asia into the midst of Slavic Europe – Ottoman Hungary was neither quite buffer state, nor yet a place where an Ottoman might feel at home. In Hungary for almost 150 rather fruitless years the Ottomans were pitted against the Habsburgs, and by the seventeenth century it was a no man’s land where Muslims were rare and lived huddled in towns if they valued their lives; where instead of the usual tribute from the Habsburg Emperor, the Pasha of Buda once received a bag of teeth drawn from the jaws of captive Ottoman officers; a costly, end-of-the-world sort of place, bankrolled by Egyptian revenues, mocked by its own great river, the Danube, whose banks were so puddled with marsh and swamp that the cattle ranched on the puszta could not be ferried away, and were herded instead into Austria, to feed Vienna. Sixty thousand steers might be sold in a year, and the profits of the trade did as much as the endless warfare to turn the Hungarian Plain into the desolate grassland it is today.

  At the other extreme there was Dalmatia, a coast pitted with ‘ravines, crevasses, precipices, caves, valleys, defiles, dens and holes in the ground’, as Kritovolos had it, infested with ne’er-do-wells who crisscrossed the borders for gain or plunder, cocking a snook at the Great Powers and their solemn treaties. When the Venetians proudly introduced Paul Rycaut to some new converts in the 1660s, he found them in such a cheerful muddle that they pictured Muhammad as the Holy Ghost, read the Gospels while circumcising their children, and drank wine like true Christians, all through Ramadan, only carefully leaving out the spices. Uskoks on the Catholic side, armatoles on the Ottoman, their exploits were sung in peasant houses not because they were decent but because they were brave. The ballads were collected and published in Venice in 1756, with this warning: ‘These songs will not be to everyone’s taste, for there is little variation among them, all of them containing the same words, such as: hero, knight, horseman, galley slave, serpent, dragon, wolf, lion, falcon, eagle, falcon’s nest and sword, sabres, lances, Kraljevic, Kobilic, Zdrinovic, necklets, medallions, decrees, heads chopped off, slaves carried away, etc. May those who find them pleasing sing them; may those who do not, go off to sleep.’*

  Villagers who lived on either side of the border in Dalmatia, like the Hungarian peasants, frequently paid tax, or tribute, or protection money several times over to whichever side arrived to levy payment; but they paid not only the Venetians and the Ottomans, but the uskoks, too. Invariably they found the uskoks gave better value. The bandits tried not to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but from an imperial point of view their constant raids discouraged major settlement, and the Ottomans made a stern effort to suppress them. An ordinance of 1588 forbade any subject of the Porte to pay ransom, in hopes of undermining the basis of the uskok economy. But kidnapping was better than bloodshed for everyone, so the men on the spot – sworn enemies, of course, and ‘evil dustlike misbelievers’, to a man, according to the Turks – arranged a hasty conference, swapped gifts, mingled their blood, and ‘went to sleep in a bed, in one another’s arms’.

  Everyone found the uskoks insupportable. The Venetians loathed them when they took to the sea, with a pirates’ nest at Zante in the Adriatic – the ‘Gulf of Venice’, as the Venetians styled it, where any bullying was for them to do; and at last the Habsburgs, too, grew tired of parrying Ottoman complaints. For half a century they had been sheltering the uskoks, and lifting from them the profits of their raids – money paid, as the uskoks pointed out, ‘for fear of our valour’, but in the mid-seventeenth century they stopped responding to uskok appeals. The Habsburgs now preferred to see the Militärgrenze, their armed line of defence, held by sturdy yeoman soldiers, after the German fashion: men who grew all their own vegetables, and fought to protect their wives and children, but who cut no dash, and never inspired one of the repetitive old songs.

  * His infuriated master, the ambassador, wanted to beat him with a horsewhip in lieu of birch twigs (for there was no birch about – a quaint Bohemian problem); but the Turks successfully spoke for him, and pleaded the folly of youth.

  * The Pleasant Conversation of the Slavic People by Andrija Kacic-Miosic, Venice, 1756.

  18

  Hoards

  Polarities had long governed the Ottoman world: the division of the world between peace and war, the choices offered by the law, the distinction between the public world and the harem; the claims to rule on two seas, and two continents. But the stunning polarity of the empire is the historical distinction that comes into focus in the early seventeenth century, between the empire’s early genius for lightness and speed, and its later reputation for lumbering sloth. It is a very weighty empire which emerges, baroque and swagged in its more exuberant phases, but sagging, too, once the first shock of containment has been absorbed.

  There exists in the Turkish military archives an inventory of the contents of Adale castle, which the Ottomans took from the Habsburgs in 1670, a year after it was built on an island of the Danube near the Iron Gates. Here are the elements of a terrific war, or at least a major engagement, one of those ‘hot skirmishes’ old Knolles often talks about: 94 bronze cannon (6 burst); an unspecified number of ladles and powder horns; 3,311 infidel muskets (11 cracked); 3,173 bombshells; 26,018 hand grenades; 17,813 cannon balls; various moulds for casting lead bullets; 6,531 shovels; and 5,850 hemp sacks and bags. But actually the inventory does not bring a hot skirmish to mind at all. All the elements of war are there, bar war itself; and in the entries for fishing tackle and fourteen saucepans you can conjure up the little garrison instead, a hundred men for so many shovels; picture them waiting on the borders, like a hundred other garrisons in the empire, living on fruit and nuts, some fields of corn, rye and wheat, and sturgeon from the river. They grew vegetables, and probably kept bees, and possibly ran a stall or two in the nearest bazaar.

  Patience was always the virtue that westerners selected, when they wished to damn the Turkish character with faint praise: they meant inanition. The classic pose of Turkish verse is, forget the lies peddled in the mosques, the great and the beautiful of the past are dead and dust, we are all mortal; let’s go down to the tavern and drink red wine. In all their poetry, writes Nermin Menemencioglu in his Turkish Verse, ‘they used the same repetitive vocabulary: the names of the same birds, animals, trees, flowers, jewels, scents, elements of nature, heavenly bodies, colours, human features, describ
ed by identical adjectives. The beloved is a moon-faced, almond-eyed beauty with a cypress-like figure. Her cheeks are rose or tulip, her locks hyacinth, her eyebrows two bows, her eyelashes arrows, her teeth pearls etc. Her waist is thinner than a hair and her ruby lips are the Fountain of Youth.’ Turkish ‘divan’ poetry was little more than a rearrangement of the same inventory, like The Pleasant Conversation of the Slavic People, or the memorialist’s list of foreign infestations in the capital.

  A man sent to investigate the strange behaviour of the Mullah of Jerusalem, who had been much annoyed by the barking of dogs and buzzing of flies, ‘found the whole city busy in catching flies, and stringing them on a long thread, that they might be told with more ease’. Everywhere one comes across stashes of men, goods and treasures in the years after the 1590s. People count their blessings and number their grievances: and they arrive not light and untrammelled, but lugging their pedigree, and jealous of advantage. The empire seemed to juggle with its stock, piling it up here, treasuring it up there, and bending its arm secretively, as it were, across the pages of its own history.

  In the Balkans, travellers noted, people had devised all manner of ways to detect buried treasure: will-o’-the-wisps, eerie lights glowing on a moonlit night. An Austrian actually found six gold ducats in the stomach of a Turk killed at Vienna in 1683, whom he hoicked over the palisade on the end of a pike; afterwards they ‘made it a common practice to dive into the Entrails, of as many as they took: Examining their Bowels like the ancient Augurs …’ A ransom – 3,000 gold purses – was discovered cemented under Kara Mustafa’s bath after he had been executed for his failure at Vienna. The garden of another disgraced grand vizier yielded three buried chests, eighteen bags with 60,000 sequins, and a chest full of precious stones. He had acquired them legally, as it happened; but it did look odd. ‘Not everyone’, remarked the bailio cheerfully, ‘could raise such radishes.’ The sultans themselves were not immune. Ahmet III used to return presents to the shop where they had been bought and exchange them for cash. Murad III threw all the coin he could lay hands on into a pit under his bed, and finally had the palace decorations melted down and made into coin, minted and stamped with his own name, for hiding in his pit. Sultan Mustafa hurled money into the sea, saying the fishes needed money to spend; and Ibrahim (whose ill-omened name was never again used by the House of Osman) strewed his beard with pearls and jewels.

  Even the sea, lapping against the walls of the Sultan’s palace, was becoming a grisly oubliette. The empire’s hopes of Mediterranean dominion were lost down there, with the 200 Ottoman ships that sank at the battle of Lepanto, which was not only the largest sea battle in history, but claimed a record number of wrecks for a single engagement. Venetian doges tossed their rings to the waves, in the ceremony which was known as their Wedding of the Sea; but Sultan Ibrahim arranged his own sort of Divorce by Water when he had all the women of his harem sewn alive into sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus.* And come a coup in the palace, you were able to reckon the severity of the purge, for ‘every night a cannon sounds to indicate that another unfortunate has been tossed to the waves’.

  After the girding ceremony at Eyup, after the visit to Mehmet II’s tomb, it was the custom for a sultan to make an inspection of the relics and mementoes of his ancestors which were piled in careless abundance in the palace vaults. The Treasury would be decorated with precious and curious items, many of them displayed against carpets hung upon the walls. In the same vein, the Sultan was always summoned when 200 bags of gold had accumulated in the fourth hall of the Treasury. Down in the basement, marked by the distribution of largesse to the head treasurer and his team, the Sultan received halva and sherbert, and watched the gold being transferred into coffers. There Ahmet I was heard to murmur that that life was a transitory thing, praising God who had given them such blessings.

  By the seventeenth century the vaults were a cross between a reliquary and a jumble sale. Windowless, they smelled of lamp oil and incense, camphor and old cotton. Joseph’s turban and Abraham’s crown were bundled up in coffers among the clothes of sultans long dead. The mantle of the Prophet was stored there, to be dipped in water at Ramadan, bottles of which were sent round under the Treasury seal to favoured dignitaries; also his beard (‘three inches long, of light brown colour, and without grey hairs’), his decayed tooth, and the impression of his foot in stone. Then there were the swords – the sacred sword of the Prophet, Omar’s twin-bladed sword, the swords of sultans, and the surrendered weapons of defeated kings. One single trunk was found to contain tables, shields, water vessels, guns, plates, china and a variety of musical instruments. There were bolts of cloth, belts, boots and shoes; napkins and old cushions, raincoats, kaftans, sofa covers and prayer mats, and hundreds of ornaments for the royal turban. In the middle of one hall stood a dais covered by a tapestry worked in gold thread, showing Charles V enthroned, with a globe in one hand and a sword in the other, receiving the homage of grandees; and on the tapestry lay European books, vellum maps, and two actual globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial.

  All the letters and gifts that sultans had ever received from the kings of France – ‘his brothers and old friends’, as the French ambassador put it – had been placed in a gilt casket with a suitable identifying inscription on the lid, and it is tempting to picture Suleyman’s successors rereading the plaintive missives dispatched by Francis I to the Grand Seigneur at his most superb. If you looked very carefully you would see Murad IV’s ‘silver pellets, thrown by him with that violence, as to stick in an iron door’; and a lot of the treasure, as visitors liked to note, was dusty. ‘Rustem gathered all this,’ read one approving inscription carved in stone, above the entrance to an empty cavern. The outer walls of the Privy Chamber were festooned with the weapons Selim had used when he took Egypt, ‘in a pitiful state’, Tavernier noted, pitted with rust. The observation chimed with the regrets of the people, who could only dream of their forebears’ strength, and of those javelin marks on the Atmaidan.

  An Austrian who visited the palace in the sixteenth century left it, according to Ottoman reports, ‘astonished, bewildered, stupefied, and completely enraptured’. In 1640, though, a palace memorandum suggested that they show off the silverware, give the gate-keepers silver-plated batons, silver over the Chamber of Petitions and the vizier’s council hall, and set the janissaries to fence when a foreign envoy was to be received. The authorities moved the Prophet’s standard from Damascus, where it had always been kept, for the 1593 campaign against the Austrians. They brought it out again for the campaign of 1594, and then abandoned all pretence of sending it home; it was kept, with all the other treasures, in the palace in Constantinople.

  Presumably the ceremony by which gold was transferred to the vaults when it reached a certain sum did not happen very often now, for in 1688 the French ambassador could report that ‘the most important occupation of the Sultan’s treasurer was to look for new slave girls and to dress them’. In Mehmet IV’s harem apartments, he wrote, ‘the number of women reached four thousand, including those in his mother’s as well as in his lover’s service. Although the plague often devastated such a multitude, their number never fell below two thousand, owing to the careful and continuous recruitment of replacements. All these women were slave girls and even the lowest-ranking ones cost some four or five hundred thalers. They wore the most expensive clothes, belts and fasteners studded with gems, earrings and several strings of pearls. Each mistress of the sultan had the power to free and give in marriage any slave girls who were in her service or who aroused her jealousy. When these freed women left the palace they took with them all the precious stones and money they had managed to accumulate there.’ Thomas Dallam allegedly glimpsed them through a little grate in a wall in 1599, believing they were boys until he noticed their plaits, and ‘britchis of scamatie, a fine clothe made of coton woll, as whyte as snow and as fine as lane; for I could desarne the skin of their thies throughe it’. His terrified guide ‘made a wry
e mouth, and stamped with his foute to make me give over looking; the which I was verrie loth to dow, for that sighte did please me wondrous well’.*

  The women could hope either to get on, by producing an heir, or to get out. A woman’s chances of bedding the Sultan, though, were extremely remote. Merely to catch the Sultan’s fancy was hard enough, for the majority of sultans were essentially family men, and many jealousies had to be allayed, and friendships forged, before a girl was allowed to catch his eye. The most important woman in the harem was the Sultan’s mother, who was allowed to call him by a name other than Padishah – Aslanim, ‘My Little Lion’. She, of course, strove to keep his attentions focused on her protégées; and the machination of these women to promote their own sons to the sultanate, the struggle of the queen mother and her daughters-in-law with the mothers of rival princes, and between lowly newcomers anxious to ingratiate themselves, made the atmosphere of the harem one of poisoned indolence in which pseudo-tasks were eagerly pursued and everyone sought something to do, some rank – to wash the Sultan’s underwear, or to care for the clothes and jewellery of the more favoured women. Hardly surprising, then, that sultans turned a bit cracked. Sultan Ibrahim, apparently, rode his girls like horses through rooms lined in fur from ceiling to floor.