Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  So it was with the Jews. When the Ottomans took Crete in 1669 and finally drove the Venetians from their seas, that branch of trade, so useful to the Salonicans who dealt in Balkan surplus, dried up. Years of Ottoman rule had already sapped the community of much of its old sophistication. The Spanish Jews had grown rich with Spain, and mastered its heady rhythms; but the Ottoman Empire – after a few bright decades, in which Jews did serve as bankers, traders and go-betweens – had disappointed them. Some began to emigrate from the empire to more dynamic countries like Holland and England (Salonica had 40,000 Jews in 1660; thirty years later, perhaps 12,000). They were leaving a tremulous and disintegrating community, further from the pulse of Europe, larger, poorer and more inward-looking.

  Jewish Merchant

  But it was still lively. Messianic tremors ran through the Jewish community; abstruse rabbinical disputes divided them; and all over Europe the year 1666 was awaited as a turning point in the history of the Jews, the year, some believed, when the chosen people would be redeemed and the House of David would reestablish itself in the Holy Land. In 1654 Sabbatai Sevi, the son of a Smyrniot commercial agent, arrived in Salonica bearing a document which proclaimed him as the Messiah. The troubled community welcomed him with a fortnight of feasts and processions, giving themselves over to a frenzy of joy in which Christians as well as Jews participated, while the Messiah sang love songs and danced about hugging the scrolls of the Law. Cooler heads arranged for his departure. In 1661 he could be found living in the lap of luxury, supported by a government official in Cairo, organising his marriage to Sarah, a Jewish girl orphaned at the age of six by Chmielnicki’s Cossacks in Poland. Raised by nuns, she had escaped to Amsterdam, and from there, moving to Leghorn, she proclaimed that she was destined to become the bride of a new Messiah. She was beautiful and charismatic and a thorough reprobate. Sabbatai’s reputation soared to new heights when they married.

  In Smyrna on New Year’s Day 1666, to the sound of trumpets in the synagogues and the acclamation of the crowds, Sabbatai Sevi proclaimed the coming of the Saviour, and an end to troubles. Orgies and merrymaking replaced, for a short while, the feasts and fasts and days of prayer hitherto incumbent on believers, while the Messiah tossed whole kingdoms and empires to his followers. Orthodox Jews were outraged.

  Eventually the Ottomans arrested him. In a personal interview with Mehmet IV, Sabbatai rather lamely agreed to ‘turn Turk’ and become a Muslim. His enthusiastic following evaporated; but some diehards shadowed their leader, and maintained such a perfect faith in him that they followed his esoteric example and embraced Islam while waiting for their Saviour’s return.

  Some years later Sabbatai Sevi died in exile, in Dulcigno. The followers of his cult hung on. Over the years, as ostensible Muslims, they lost their Spanishness and spoke Turkish among themselves; but neither Muslims nor Jews would have anything to do with them. In well-hidden Salonican synagogues they maintained their esoteric Hebrew rites, as prone to argument and dissension as any cult, so that by the end of the nineteenth century about 18,000 of them, mostly rich businessmen and merchants, formed three separate groups. They never intermarried, but they did liaise. Every morning, right up to the Greek conquest of Salonica in 1912, seven men would stand by the city gates shading their eyes to see if the Messiah was coming up the road.

  As merchants and go-betweens, the Jews were finally outstripped by the Greeks, who watched them like hawks – in Athens, well into the nineteenth century, Jews were permitted to stay in town for only three days (‘God preserve you from the Hebrews of Salonica, and the Greeks of Athens …’). The Greeks were ‘crafty, subtle and acute’, travellers agreed; ‘their bad fortune hath not been able to take from them … much natural Subtlety or Wit’. ‘The Greek in his cups is lively, enterprising, and desperate, he is noisy and quarrelsome, he wants to fight, to kill, and to dethrone the Ottoman monarch, that he may restore the empire to the Christians,’ recalled Elias Haneschi in 1784. ‘I like the Greeks,’ Byron wrote, ‘who are plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices without their courage. However some are brave and all are beautiful.’

  Greek Merchant

  There were Greeks scattered throughout the empire, not just in the Greek peninsula; they had been in Anatolia, of course, since ancient times, when Alexander’s conquests had made demotic Greek the lingua franca of the Levant, the medium of trade, government and scripture. The later development of the Byzantine Empire had put Greek on a solid footing in the Balkans and across the Middle East; and under the Ottomans Greek was an administrative language, the language of power, like Ottoman Turkish; so you did not need to be born Greek to become, to all intents and purposes, a Greek yourself. There was a natural tendency to identify any educated Greek with a person on the make. With a desk job in the church or the government of the Principalities, Porter said, ‘ostentatious pride, empty vanity, contemptuous insolence, acts of tyranny and oppression, attend their prosperity: Deposed, you see them dejected, pliant, base, grovelling, even to most abject servility.’ A Greek doctor was only a Greek who could not wangle himself a proper job. Porter knew one who sold lion’s urine as a cure for infertility; it was his own. ‘Any common servant to a physician of any tolerable reputation, after a few years’ service, were it only in beating the mortar … thinks himself sufficiently skilled in the medicinal art to stand on his own bottom, and kill by diploma.’

  Athenian dress

  Greeks succumbed to whirlwind cravings. Their devotions were sensual. The church kept them together as a people, with saints’ days and services, ceaselessly celebrating deaths, births, weddings, baptism, forever edifying the language. Outside church they were frequently accused of irreligion, but the charge was unfair; they were capricious and changeable, and what moved them at one moment was tossed aside by the quicksilver shift from solemnity to merriment.

  Just like the Montenegrins they were followers of fads, and possessed the enthusiasm which leads to trade, with ‘a natural Dexterity in all the little Matters they undertake’. Sturdy moralists were driven to despair. ‘They do not know the difference between good and evil,’ snapped a sixteenth-century Athenian noblewoman; ‘a people without religion, decision or shame, wicked and reckless, with mouths open for insults and reproaches, grumbling, barbarous tongued, loving strife and trouble and gossip, petty, loquacious, arrogant, lawless, crafty, inquisitive and wide-awake to profit by the misfortune of others.’ But the Greeks didn’t mind her peddling her prejudices; they weren’t at all offended; and after her death at the hands of a Turkish gang, the Athenians beatified her as St Philothei, and made her the city’s favourite saint.

  The Greeks, after all, were a very broad community, entertaining every shade of opinion and embracing every layer of society. There were learned, religious and reformist Greeks, like the Patriarch Loukris, a Cretan, who attempted to establish a bridge between Orthodoxy and the Reformation. There were poor Greeks such as you see nowadays whacking octopuses to death on seaside rocks, prior to turning them inside out. There were very rich Greeks, in administrative competition with the Jews, who lived in palaces in Constantinople. There were Greeks of doubtful origin who lived in an atmosphere of Byzantine splendour and deceit, ruling the Principalities with archaic ritual and timid devotion to the Porte. There were Greeks who established a New Town for themselves in western Anatolia, with boulevards and theatres. There were angry Greeks, and complacent Greeks, shepherd Greeks, island Greeks, Albanian Greeks and Bulgarian Greeks, and above all there were Greeks of one sort or another all along the empire’s coasts: in Smyrna and other cities along the Anatolian seaboard, on the islands of the Aegean, around the Peloponnese and the Greek peninsula. So they always had the sea, the very essence of caprice. By the mid-eighteenth century the Greek community in Marseilles was one of the richest in Europe; the French consul in 1764 believed that the Greeks had 615 ships and employed 37,526 sailors. After Russia and the Ottoman Empire signed the treaty of Kucuk Kainardji in 1774, the Greeks were allowe
d to trade under the Russian flag, and they soon controlled the Black Sea, their dominance extending over all Balkan import and export, and across the eastern Mediterranean. The French felt the squeeze in the Levant. The British went so far as to call for their elimination, with self-interested venom, and also a certain righteous indignation – for the Greeks were a piratical lot, and some economists have suggested that Greek wealth was founded on capital seized on the high seas.

  Greeks had the church: Mehmet the Conqueror saw to that, his arrangements for the Orthodox millet, or community, making the church a powerful instrument of state control. Ecclesiastics enjoyed state backing. By the sixteenth century the upper echelons of the church hierarchy were stuffed with men who had purchased their office and recouped the cost from those below – ultimately the hapless Orthodox peasant, paying his tithe. A Greek-speaking aristocracy of sorts developed around the Greek patriarchate sited in the Phanar quarter of Constantinople; and they proved very loyal to the authorities who put them in power. Entry to the club was reserved for Greek-speakers. The Phanariots were proud of their Hellenic institutions, and regarded themselves as heirs to the glories of ancient Greece. Prince Cantemir, the author of the History of the Turks, proudly sketched the amenities of the Phanar quarter, which included an academy, he says, where philosophy was taught in all its branches, in pure uncorrupted Greek. By the eighteenth century the Phanariots controlled five of the most important posts in the empire. They supplied the Patriarch, and the hospodars of the two Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia. In the old days there had never been any special need for interpreters, since Ottoman officials themselves spoke a variety of tongues; but once the officials were selected from officials’ sons, then Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian were the only languages they knew, and foreigners were encouraged to make use of the imperial dragomen, or interpreters. Both the Dragoman to the Porte and the Dragoman of the Fleet were Phanariot Greeks.

  Greek sailor

  The Phanariots monopolised these jobs, and also the dubious reputation that went with them. Foreigners and Ottomans alike tended to regret the influence of the dragomen, who effectively controlled the increasingly important avenues of communication between the Porte and the world beyond, and thrived in an atmosphere of hints, promises, bribes, and concocted misunderstandings: ‘In Pera sono tre malanni: Peste, fuoco, dragomanni!’

  Phanar houses

  Eleven Phanariot families provided the hospodars who were sent to squeeze the Principalities. The Patriarch and his underlings worked to bring the whole Orthodox world under Greek tutelage, so that the Pec patriarchate, re-created by Sokullu Mehmet as a vehicle for a relative, was suppressed after the Austrians cannily invited the Serbian Patriarch to enter their dominions (and their control) with 37,000 Serbian families. The Bulgarian See of Ohrid in Macedonia, though long since hellenised, remained autocephalous until 1767, when it was finally abolished. Old Slavonic disappeared from the liturgy: in 1825 the Metropolitan Ilarion set fire to all the Slavonic books he found in the old library of the Bulgarian patriarch in Turnovo; and the Phanariots squeezed Greek and non-Greek with impartial zest, demanding payments for consecrating priests, or saying prayers, or blessing a new church. Their power rested on the threat of excommunication, of course: which incidentally stoked the vampire legend, most Orthodox believing that the body of an excommunicant would not decay so long as the devil had its soul. Their theology was not very distinguished, but they remained such implacable foes of western Christianity that in 1722 the Pope was anathematised, for the umpteenth time, for the crime of wearing shoes embroidered with a cross.

  The Greeks and the Ottomans were united in their dislike of the Catholic West. Venice wrested the Peloponnese from the Ottomans in 1699, but although she brought prosperity to the region she failed to win the hearts of the Greek population: Greek merchants complained that the wealth all ran into Venetian pockets, everyone resented the arrival of Catholic priests and Venetian attacks on the Orthodox church, comparing their plight with the freedom of worship enjoyed by their fellows across the Ottoman border, and the Ottoman army which invaded the Peloponnese in 1718 drove out the Venetians with the help of the local population.

  Unfortunately for the Phanariots, their cosy arrangement with the Porte was disturbed by the rise of a rival vision of Orthodox power, one that was not quiescent and Byzantine, but martial and increasingly wedded to a classical vision of the Greeks. Soon after his defeat on the Pruth in 1711, Peter the Great had moved to bring the Russian church under his personal supervision, turning it into an arm of the state. His agents, secular and divine, began to circulate through the Sultan’s Balkan territories, presenting the Greeks with the dream – which only the Tsar could realise for them – of a Christian Constantinople risen again, proud at least, if not necessarily quite free.

  The Russians inevitably fanned the flames of mistrust, raising hopes they were not strong enough to fulfil, and fears which they had no desire to allay. In 1770 the Orloff brothers were sent to the Peloponnese to whip up support for the Russian fleet, but they found the Greeks less resolute and united than they had expected, and left cursing their greed and inertia. The Peloponnesians, for their part, had expected to see more men and ships, and felt betrayed. The much-vaunted rebellion went off at half cock: several thousand Greeks took up arms and managed to seize Navarino, but the Russians had by then lost interest in the project. The Ottomans, of course, were thoroughly alarmed. The Ottoman governor was only able to quash the revolt by calling in the Albanians, who cheerfully set about massacring the population until they were ejected by an Ottoman army in 1779.

  The treaty of Kucuk Kainardji in 1774, which the Tsarina understood to place ‘Orthodoxy under our Imperial Guardianship in the places whence it sprang’, extended Russian protection to Greek shipping; and the Philiki Hetaira, a secret society devoted to the overthrow of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and the cause of Greek independence, was founded in the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa in 1814, moving to Constantinople, with Russian consular aid, in 1817. Phanariots were divided. It was a Phanariot officer, Alexander Ypsilantis, serving as aide-de-camp to the Tsar, who led a Greek raid on Bucharest and Jassy in 1821, hoping to light the fires of rebellion. His raid was a dismal failure; the rebellion failed to ignite; and Ypsilantis fled to Austria; but the fear it inspired in Constantinople provoked a Muslim backlash against Greek establishments in the city; despite the refusal of the Grand Mufti to sanction any action against the Greek community, the Sultan himself was convinced of his patriarch’s involvement in the insult.

  The tragedy of the Phanariots is encompassed in the life and death of Patriarch Gregory. In the midst of the anti-Greek rioting, Gregory anathematised Ypsilantis and his agents, reminding his flock of the gratitude they owed the Porte for preserving the faith from the corruptions of western Christendom. But the Ottomans hanged him all the same when his own brother, a Peloponnesian bishop, placed himself at the head of the rebels. His body was given to a group of Jews, who were told to cut it up and feed it to the dogs; rumour suggested that they sold it back to the Christians for 100,000 piastres, but it may be that they cast the corpse into the Bosphorus where, shortly afterwards, it bobbed to the surface. A Greek sea captain grappled it aboard his ship, before continuing on his way to Odessa with a cargo of grain. There Gregory was given a martyr’s funeral, and became the very thing he had never wished to be, a beacon for Hellenic hopes.

  On the Black Sea the Giray dynasty of Tartar khans – descended from Genghis himself – retained their sovereignty over the wild horsemen of the Crimea, whom they brought to campaigns in eastern Europe. Their loyalty to the Sultan increased as Russian pressure on them mounted in the eighteenth century. Now and then they might be unleashed against recalcitrant vassals such as the territories of modern Romania across the Danube, Wallachia and Moldavia; but the closer they identified themselves with the Ottoman military machine the more anachronistic they appeared. By the late eighteenth century the empire was run by su
btle diplomats who were prepared to sacrifice them to Russia if it allowed them to pluck a treaty from the years of Russian intervention in the Balkans, and in 1774 the Porte gave the Crimea an independence it did not want. Russia annexed the peninsula ten years later, and gradually marginalised the Tartars in their own lands. Most of them left for Ottoman territory west of the Black Sea, becoming famous throughout the empire as messengers and guides; some 50,000 remained in the Crimea, but so far on the fringes of Russian patronage and society that in 1940 they greeted the Germans as their liberators, enlisted in their armies, and were ultimately scattered wholesale across the eastern USSR by Stalin.

  The war that might have brought Moldavia and Wallachia into the narrowest orbit of the Ottoman system was never waged. The boyars proved very pliant, with Tartar prodding, happy to use the ceaseless Ottoman demand for sheep and grain as a means of enserfing their peasants, passing on the squeeze; while the Ottomans did not mind how the Principalities governed themselves, provided that they maintained the tribute payments and supplied the Ottoman authorities with foodstuffs at the stipulated price. Troops intervened, where necessary, to ensure successions, and punish laggardly hospodars; but the Ottomans maintained no garrisons in the country, and relied on the subjection of the people to the Orthodox church, and the subjection of the church to their own appointed patriarch in Istanbul. The rulership was sold off to the highest bidder every few years, so that the incumbent, who was always an Orthodox Christian, ground his people hard to recoup the purchase price.