Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The Ottomans were a very swaggering people, like Texans of the old school, and their Ottoman sense of caste remained singular, as ever. No longer drawn from peasant stock, but from boys to the manner born, the ruling class became fiercely insular. Nothing could dent their pride. They supposed that everything in their empire was not only bigger, but more harmonious and more interesting than elsewhere. ‘The hosts of the Padishah are the most powerful force in the world; but unfortunately they do not have enough to eat,’ a visitor was told at the beginning of this century. A near-unbroken series of defeats at the hands of infidels suggested, to subtler minds, the possibility that something might be learned from them (in 1805 the Ottoman ambassador to France was writing sniffily, ‘I have not yet seen the Frangistan that people speak of and praise’), but the open expression of curiosity was considered bad form, like the invasion of the harem, and Urquhart noticed that whereas the Greeks would rush at you with such eagerness for news that they asked the question in three languages in a single breath – ‘Ti mandata – ti chaberi – ti nea?’ – the Turks maintained a measured politesse, and waited to be told a thing before they asked. The kapikullari preferred to find the reasons for failure in some unwonted deviation from the old routine. Again and again they grappled with these abuses; matters improved; vigilance relaxed; and the same abuses increased a hundredfold, and had to be repressed with greater effort, until at the very last the system cracked, like a piston head.

  Until then, though, all the cabals, factions, rivalries and bitter jealousies that seemed to rend the kul from top to bottom and from side to side were only the feuds that might plague any old and very haughty family. ‘Give me the seal, you foolish boy!’ roared the Chief Black Eunuch in a moment of crisis; and the hapless Grand Vizier of the moment, a man, one would have said, of eminence and age, meekly gave way as one might to a terrifying and wrinkled mother-in-law.

  They possessed, contra mundum, all the dignity of an old family. Louis XIV’s ambassador sought an audience with the Grand Vizier to inform him of his master’s victory over the German princes of the Rhine. Old Koprulu, the Grand Vizier, withered him with this reply: ‘What does my master care, if the Dog worry the Hog, or the Hog the Dog, but that his Head is safe?’ Louis XIV received the same kind of dusty answer from the Ottoman ambassador at his court; for when he condemned the attitude of the Dutch, who had lately overthrown their prince, his ally, ‘we Ottomans,’ the ambassador said, ‘are accustomed to overthrow our princes.’

  French hauteur – which froze the assembled diplomatic corps of all Europe – broke like foam on the granite pride of the Ottomans, who maintained their French friendship with excruciating magnanimity, and proffered them the trade concessions, called Capitulations, which they so ardently desired. The French, of course, were more used to handing out this kind of treatment themselves. The French ambassador in the days of Mehmet III had to be carried, raving, from Istanbul, and died in an asylum in Sévigny, victim of his own unbending sense of decorum. The outgoing ambassador had left him a memo on protocol in which he playfully recorded that he had done what no man, native or foreign, had ever done, and carried a blade into an audience with the Sultan. In point of fact it was no more than a tiny dagger, almost a toy, which he had carried in his hose; but his successor was not aware of this. Naturally he was not about to retreat from a privilege accorded thereby to his master the King of France; but when he turned up at the palace wearing his sword and refused to disarm, he was turned away; and no amount of bluster, argument, persuasion and beseeching was of any avail. For several years he lived on in Istanbul, worrying at the point, unable to meet the Sultan, until his mind finally gave way.

  But the British ambassador Porter would have advised him to steer clear of the whole thing: the reception of ambassadors struck him as so humiliating that he could only suppose that nobody had ever dared mention it to their respective governments before, and force a change in proceedings. In fact Venetian reports since the fifteenth century had talked of little else, and Porter was merely one of the first ambassadors conscious of his country’s swelling power vis à vis the fading grandeur of the Porte. His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador found himself crammed into a waiting room ‘fit for a Polish Jew’; in the second court of the Seraglio he was asked to wait on a rain-soaked bench, and when he finally reached the audience chamber the Sultan sat at an angle to him, and all the talk was conducted with a Grand Vizier. He was obliged to sit again, for hours, while a divan of which he could not follow a word took place. Mounted at last and ready to head for home, he found himself obliged to wait in the saddle while the Grand Vizier, and all his retinue, assembled and proceeded to ride out first.

  From the seventeenth century the empire went into its shell. It went its own way, and maintained its proud ignorance of the West as the manners and mores of the two Europes diverged. Each supposed itself, for lack of better evidence, superior. The western powers made a point of their science, and quarantine stations were sniffily established all around the empire.* The great influx of renegades was over: fewer westerners were willing to make the crossing and turn Turk; and the Turks themselves were far less willing to adopt them. The man sent to hunt down old manuscripts for Louis XIV in Constantinople had been taken up by one of the janissary regiments when his money ran out; it was hard to conceive of this happening now. It had been a matter of course to meet old janissaries speaking broken German, and every embassy took the risk of seeing a number of its men turn Turk – Wratislaw, for instance, saw a Cretan Italian in his suite tear off his hat, trample it, cut it into pieces and fling the lot into the Danube, to signal his meaning to the Turks. Foreign experts were a rare sight now, and the Porte no longer demanded that they convert; on the contrary, it desired them to remain apart.

  Although their hospitality was superb (‘I am not an innkeeper,’ a Turk would say if a traveller offered to pay for his entertainment, whereas Greeks tended to follow up a friendly visit by presenting a bill), at an official level the Ottomans came to mistrust the western powers, and felt an insult keenly. It was recalled that while the Turkish ambassador was introducing the French to the civilised pleasures of drinking coffee,* the French were landing a shipload of false coin in Istanbul, whose circulation caused an insurrection. Nettled pride made them spiky and unpredictable, and there followed ‘a time hazardous for foreign diplomatists, when the French ambassador was struck in the face, and beaten with a chair; that of Russia kicked out of the audience chamber; the minister of Poland almost killed; and the Imperial [i.e. Austrian] Interpreter bastinadoed’.

  In 1774, after their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Russians, ambassadors were exchanged to hammer out the detail of the treaty of Kucuk Kainardji. Much of the negotiation on the border, as it turned out, involved the meeting that was to occur. The Russian wanted an upholstered chair. ‘Since we are not accustomed to chairs, disposing of an upholstered chair in this area is difficult,’ he was told. ‘This time, however, it has been arranged. The chair … has been brought from the voivode of Moldavia on condition that it be returned.’ Would the local Ottoman governor cross the river and escort the Russian over? No: he was governor first, broker of the meeting second; and in his gubernatorial hat, he pointed out, ‘whatever time they desire to cross to this side is of no consequence to me. It is up to them.’

  The ambassadors met on a raft moored in the middle of the river. The Russian had insisted on sitting on Mehmet Pasha’s right; unable to overcome this, the pasha recorded that he had organised ‘a subtle procedure by which outwardly there would be no perception of left and right’, with the Russian seated in such a way that ‘to those entering from the Ottoman side it appeared that the Russian side was on the left’.

  Discussions over, the Ottoman ambassador was taken to a quarantine station, built of pine, he reported, with gardens, wallpaper and tiled stoves. His Russian escort, instructed to tell Catherine the Great what gifts the Ottomans had brought, so that she could match them, suggested that the O
ttoman ambassador should not stay overlong in quarantine, but simply let them fumigate his goods one by one. Mehmet Pasha rumbled him, pointing out that no ambassador before had been quarantined. As he wrote in his report, ‘The general says – “I speak out of real affection for you. Our empress is horrified at the thought of disease. Your acquiescence would please her …” He terminated his words with some Frankish cliché such as, “My friendship for you is joined to faithfulness and is beyond description.” He was unable to achieve his aim.’

  Ottoman pride was perhaps ridiculous because it was misplaced; but it was certainly real. The pasha brought before the conqueror of Egypt in 1802 was superb. ‘I shall take care to inform the Sultan of the courage you have displayed in the battle, though it has been your mishap to lose it,’ Napoleon told him courteously. ‘Thou mayst save thyself the trouble,’ he replied. ‘My master knows me better than thou canst.’

  In happier days to follow, the French emperor Napoleon III and his empress, Eugénie, spent a week in Istanbul as the Sultan’s guests in 1862. The Empress was so taken with a concoction of aubergine purée and lamb that she asked for permission to send her own chef to the kitchens to study the recipe. The request was graciously granted by their host, and the chef duly set off with his scales and notebook. The Sultan’s cook slung him out, roaring, ‘An imperial chef cooks with his feelings, his eyes, and his nose!’

  The dish went down in Turkish culinary history as Hunkarbegendi, or ‘the Empress was pleased’; but Eugénie never got the recipe.

  * In 1995 fastidious Macedonian border guards made us trample up and down in a tray of disinfectant when we emerged from incorrigible Albania, under the eye of a man in a white coat.

  * Coffee replaced spices as the staple of Egypt’s trade with the West soon after – the spices were carried by European ships around the Cape.

  23

  Borderlands

  By the eighteenth century the calcifying empire appeared encrusted with peculiar polities that had grown up in the vacuum of initiative, waiting in vain to be reorganised and digested by the central authority. They achieved a sort of ramshackle permanence instead, like eccentric lodgers in a rambling country house. There was the monkish republic of Athos. There were chartered Greek monasteries like that of St Catherine in Syria, to whom Mehmet the Conqueror, if not the Prophet himself, had promised liberties in perpetuity (the Patriarch had no charter when he found himself defending his right to a church in Constantinople, but he dug out an old janissary who had been present at the Conquest, and who backed him up). As late as 1755 under the very walls of the Seraglio there stood a row of houses which were finally slated for demolition to create a firebreak. All the owners consented, except an old lady who ‘declared she would not part with hers; it had been a property in her family for several generations, and no money could compensate the infinite value it was of to her … The men in power cried out and abused her; but the injustice appeared too violent to dare take it by force; the house stood; and when it was asked why the sultan did not use his authority? take it, and pay the value? the answer was, ’Tis impossible, it cannot be done, it is her property.’

  While the Ottoman approach to her dependencies seemed characterised by inertia, the Ragusans, typically, moved on unassisted. In the late sixteenth century they were put to the squeeze by a shrewd manoeuvre of the Venetians and the Jews to establish Split, instead, as the major gateway to the Balkans from the west. Ragusa’s response was to take control of the carrying trade, and for a while the republic possessed the largest merchant fleet in the world.* The Ragusans still maintained their merchant plazzae in every town of consequence in the empire, and still pleasantly mourned each execution in the city, performed by an imported Turkish executioner, but gradually they slipped from the Ottoman embrace. They remained so robustly oligarchical that in all 500 years of Ragusan self-government only one monument to a nobleman was ever erected, which in any case commemorates not so much a man as a moment. The Ragusans sent Nikolica Buni to the Pasha of Bosnia, to refuse him a loan. The pasha, they reasoned, might kill the messenger; but he was no longer capable of threatening Ragusa. ‘To violence you will reply with renunciation and suffering,’ they told Nikolica Buni. ‘Promise nothing, give nothing, suffer everything. The Republic is watching you. There you will meet a glorious death, but here the land will be free. Be united and reply that we are free men, that this is tyranny and God will judge them.’ The Ragusans had gauged the business with typical exactitude; and to mark Nikolica Buni’s martyrdom a small tablet was placed posthumously, instinctively hidden from the vulgar gaze, in the Hall of the Grand Council.

  Napoleon finished off Ragusa as he had finished off Venice, though without quite the same relish. He never muttered of being an Attila to this republic, nor described its main square as the drawing room of Europe: in 1807 he had his decree annexing it to the province of Illyria read out by an NCO. Like Venice, Ragusa was tossed to the Austrians when Napoleon fell, but if Venice whirled with gaiety to compensate, the Ragusans replied with a spiny honorability which was not at all Venetian, but owed everything instead to the mountain codes that flourished at her back. The best families of the republic vowed not to marry or have children while under foreign occupation; and by 1918, when the Austrians were at last forced out in favour of the new Yugoslavia, they had all died out.

  Up the coast the Montenegrins remained largely independent though the centuries, suffering Turkish rule on their more accessible lower slopes but rejecting it successfully higher up. ‘We found the enemy so numerous’, three Montenegrin scouts reported in 1711, ‘that had we all three been turned to salt, we should not have been enough to salt their soup. But their army is only a pack of one-legged, one-handed cripples.’ No one could conquer Montenegro; a big army would starve there, and a small one never stood a chance. Their men sniped from the rocks with carbines three yards long, their women triggered off landslips, and their children fetched ammunition and used their catapults. They made the Turks look clumsy, and the Albanians effete; they were all over six foot tall, preternaturally handsome, and they considered the cruellest jibe to be ‘I know your people: all your ancestors died in their beds.’ When the last of the Black Princes left in 1516, the Montenegrins entrusted their government to Bishop Babylas, partly because he was pious and wise, and partly because he was a terrific warrior. Their enthusiasm for Orthodoxy was unbounded, and in the eighteenth century they were far more prone than any other Balkan people to listen to the promises of Russian agents: being so remote, perhaps, the Montenegrins had a weakness for novelties. In 1493, with Cyrillic type brought from Venice, the first printing works in the Slavic world had been established here of all places, a mere twenty years after Caxton’s; but quite soon they melted down the lead for bullets. The barrack-like palace they built for their prince in 1830 is called the Biljarda, after the billiard table which the prince-poet-bishop had brought up by mule train. In the late eighteenth century they were so smitten by all things Russian that they temporarily cast their bishop prince aside in favour of a dwarfish adventurer who persuaded them that he was none other than the Tsar Peter III, Catherine the Great’s murdered husband, come to lead them in an all-out battle against Muhammadan superstition. In 1766 they made him their ruler, under the name Steven the Small. The Russians were as embarrassed as the Ottomans, and there was general relief when in 1773 the Porte managed to get him poisoned by a Greek servant. With this exception, the Montenegrins continued to be ruled by the Vladikas until 1851, at first an elective, then a hereditary line of fighting bishop princes – the succession passing from uncle to nephew, since the bishops were celibate; in 1851 Dnilo II dropped the ecclesiastical title to marry, and was assassinated.

  Until the 1970s, at least, there remained black-skinned Montenegrins at Ulcinj, descended from sixteenth-century slaves, for as long as Ottoman rule lasted nominally in these parts (until 1878) Ulcinj was a nest of corsairs – Moroccan, Albanian, Turkish and Serbian – who came in 1571 with the Bey
of Algiers, to have a crack at Venice.

  The Jews were sustained by a sense of destiny and loss. On their arrival in Salonica from Spain in the early sixteenth century, they had built themselves synagogues named after Castille or Catalonia, Aragon, Toledo or Cordova; and men who had saved their fortunes from the wreck, like Don Señor Benveniste, son of a former finance minister in Spain, founded schools and libraries, academies which offered courses in astronomy and mathematics and philosophy; and printing presses turning out philosophical, theological and religious treatises. Their style of cookery, their dignified bearing, the dazzling cleanliness of their appearance, the way they began a story – ‘era’n buenos d’un rey’, ‘it was in the good days of a king’ – betrayed their Spanishness. When a Spanish senator paid a visit to Salonica in 1904 he was naïvely overjoyed, not only to find himself prattling away on the street in his own tongue, but to feel, in his bones, so perfectly at home.

  Salonica, though, had already failed. It failed, curiously, just as and when Spain itself had failed: there was a curious equivalence between the two empires, Spanish and Ottoman, whose sixteenth-century skirmishes for power in the Mediterranean and in Central Europe seemed so pivotal, and yet so utterly irrelevant a century later. Both empires hit their stride at the same time; both seemed invincible; and yet they began their decline together from the seventeenth century and both became proud, weak and helplessly particularist. Between the two leviathans, like a midget referee, was Venice, whose bailio in Madrid was quite as busy as his colleague in Istanbul: her stock sank, too, as the protagonists lost their punch, and the avid spectators of the sixteenth century drifted out. If the modern period has a starting date, it might be the moment at which the political colossi of the Renaissance world bowed out: the Spanish Armada thwarted, Ottoman designs on Persia and Europe checked, and Venice declining into a backwater, far from the hungry adventure of the Atlantic.