Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  Only when the native hospodars began leaguing with the Russians in 1711 were they replaced by the more biddable Phanariots of Istanbul, who pretended to a Byzantine style, but maintained the grind; so that the peasants, feeling the double standard where it hurt the most, devised a special cart, with runcible shafts, to be driven away in either direction at the first sign of trouble, and took to eating that dreadful maize mush, mamaliga, knowing it was one grain that rapacious tax officers would not seize, finding there was no market for it (like the Irish potato).

  The way people were beginning to huddle together for security potently illustrates the collapse of Ottoman order. An intricate pattern in the lost Ottoman world had linked the borders to the palace, the centre to the sentinel; its subsequent caricature was the alliance between the palace bureaucracy and the fierce montagnards from Albania. The Grand Vizier Ahmet Koprulu was Albanian himself, and amid the faithlessness and opportunism of the empire’s servants he had recognised the franker opportunism and loyalty of the Albanians – who were mostly Muslims, and whose oath of loyalty, or besa, was considered binding and final, so harshly etched was the mountain honour code, the so-called Law of Lek, by which they were raised. But a multitude of Albanians soon infested every major city of the empire – 11,000 in Constantinople joined Patrona’s rebellion in 1730. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, peering from her lumbering purdah carriage, fancied their soldiery immensely, in their gleaming white blouses. Byron adored them a century later, as much as they were detested by his Greeks – quite understandably, too, for whenever their luck ran out they would merrily sing that they had their ‘musket for vizier, and their carbine for pasha’, and go off to terrorise their neighbours. They were especially dangerous to the Greeks, whose various rebellions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century they were detailed to quash; a task they performed in a leisurely way, cheerfully describing Missolonghi – the longest and bloodiest affray of the last Greek rebellion in the 1820s – as their bank.

  It was as if the Albanians, infesting every city in the empire, or the 20,000 Moroccans in Cairo, or the 200,000 Crimean Tartars who from 1774, pressed by the Russians, came pouring into the Dobruja west of the Black Sea, were hoarding themselves. The eighteenth century saw a rush to the cities, a flight from the land, and a staggering drop in the population – in the Balkans from perhaps 8 million in Suleyman’s day to 3 million by the 1750s. In times of trouble huge numbers made the Haj to Mecca, suffering the predations of the Bedouin; efforts to drive them away from the Syrian desert marches, and the Yörük and Kurdish nomads further towards them, came to nothing. Bosnian Muslim colonists in Hungary started to pull back into safe Ottoman territory, where they proved very independent; Serbs began moving north into the Habsburg Empire, where they proved rather pliant. The Austrians employed them as border warriors. The Russian invasion of the Principalities in 1736 sparked a peasant exodus over the Habsburg border which persisted with the resumption of Phanariot rule three years later: Mavrocordato, the Prince of Wallachia, ushered in all manner of liberal reforms in the 1740s, but for the peasantry the liberal extension of freedom was combined with the liberal extension of insoluble debts, and amounted to the same slavery as the naked oppression of the past. As for the eternally ruthless boyars and the court, the experience of abandoning one style, Byzantine, anachronistic, exploitative and avowedly corrupt, in favour of a flirtation with the philosophes, modern, Frenchified, exploitative and corrupt, did nothing to improve their world standing, and gave rise to the old jibe that the Romanians are not a nation but a profession.* So when the Russians came again in 1769, 1774 and 1812, with higher hopes and fancier propaganda, perhaps 200,000 Bulgars crossed the Danube to join them.

  The Ottomans always found it harder to impose their system on co-religionists. They could do little more in the eighteenth century than send out governors and garrisons, and make judicial appointments; Egypt and Algiers, Syria and Tunisia, stuck to their old ways, at best supplying the empire with a fixed sum in tribute, but more often in default. In Tunisia, the tradition of a peripatetic ruler, the Mahalla, was so entrenched and efficient that the Ottomans appointed a governor to Tunis, and a Bey of the Camp to supervise the interior. Mecca kept its sherif. The Egyptian Mamelukes continued to recruit from the slave markets of the Caucasus. Long before the janissaries of Constantinople grew corrupt, the corps was going its own way in the Middle East: in 1577 the Porte complained to the governor of Damascus that janissary vacancies were not being given ‘to good capable young men from Rum, following my command, but to rich and favoured natives and foreigners’, and by 1659 the governor was obliged to look on while the local janissaries and a task force from the capital slugged it out for power in the streets. In Tunisia, the vacancies went to Turkish half-castes; in Algeria, on the other hand, the Turks were so isolated that they continued recruiting troops from the Levant – Smyrna especially – until the nineteenth century.

  But even a city as close to the seat of Ottoman power as Aleppo, and as important to its caravan routes, had to be governed with tact and flexibility. Thirty miles beyond the city boundaries the untameable Bedouin roamed the fringes of the desert: they were kept in check, where possible, by a so-called Prince of the Arabs – as prickly and demanding as any of his fellows, but ideally more powerful – appointed by the governor. Within the city, lacking any real military clout, the governor worked through a divan made up of local notables – financiers, concessionaires, tax farmers, landowners and members of the powerful ulema. On the streets, too, he had to hold the ring between sherifs and janissaries, who brokered power. The sherifs were all theoretically descendants of the Prophet, and one of their tasks was to keep the family records: their numbers seemed to swell, however, whenever their power was threatened by the janissaries, who as everywhere else had become a hydra of privilege among the ordinary artisans of the city. By his handling of this ancient rivalry the governor was not only enjoined to keep the peace, but also to recoup the hundreds of thousands of piastres he had shelled out to receive the appointment in the first place, in the knowledge that after a year at best another well-greased palm in Constantinople was likely to secure his replacement.

  With the decline of the Ottoman navy in the seventeenth century, and the effective retreat from the western Mediterranean, the North African coast grew increasingly independent, and its rulers, always happy to celebrate a distant Ottoman victory in Europe, or to send congratulations on the birth of an Ottoman son in the most grovelling and acceptable style, blandly ignored orders that flooded out of Istanbul. Of course Islamic loyalty counted for something. In the sixteenth century the North African Moriscos, forever dreaming of Andalusia, were delighted to see the Ottomans engage in their naval struggle with the Spaniards, and however politically independent they became, the people of North Africa were glad of Ottoman victory, and proud of their association with Islam’s spearhead. A Damascene diary records the grand prayers offered up on Mount Qasiyun in December 1667 for the victory in Crete: prayers for the Sultan, the Pasha, his retinue, and the soldiers of the faithful, ‘a grandiose affair and a day the like of which was never seen … I think that among the inhabitants of Damascus only a hundred or so … didn’t go onto the mountain, being handicapped or bakers. Despite that, I heard that most of them prayed themselves, too, for victory and conquest.’

  When Selim took the keys to the Holy Cities in 1517, and pledged himself and his successors to the protection of the Haj, he appears to have inherited the mantle of Caliph as well; but there is nothing to show that either he or his son took the title very seriously. It was technically in abeyance, and if anything it was applied to the Ottoman sultans as a complimentary gesture, ex officio, to the man who best embodied Islam’s hopes, and whose overweening military success lent credence to the faith. Most of the world’s Muslims performed the entire pilgrimage under Ottoman jurisdiction, and as the great caravan crossed the deserts it followed the Ottoman imperial camels which went out each year; drank water provided by t
he Ottomans; and relied on the organisational abilities of the Ottoman governor of Damascus, who devoted three months to it every year. Only much later, when sultans were losing ground and subjects to the infidels, did the caliphal claims come into play; and it was the Russians, filching the Crimea from the Ottomans in 1774, who tossed the Sultan this dubious compensation, and wrote it into their treaty.

  ‘Your slave has been brought up under the shade of your empire,’ Muhammad Bey of Tunisia wrote to the Sultan in 1855; but only on the occasion of proclaiming himself a sultan too.* Algeria had enrolled in the empire rather by accident, when the Algerians turned to Barbarossa for help and Barbarossa turned to the Porte; after Lepanto in 1571 it became clear that the Ottomans were not going to win the western Mediterranean and the relationship cooled almost to nothingness. The last communication of the Dey of Constantine with the Sublime Porte was also unusually humble: it was in 1837, and the French were poised to reduce his city as they had taken Algiers seven years before. ‘The enemy of God marches on us … We do not have the power to attack without the help of God and the Sublime Porte … This land is yours, these people are yours also, we are the faithful and obedient servants of your Imperial majesty,’ added the Bey in desperation: it must have been the first the Sultan knew of it.

  Egypt proved very hard to keep under control, although its grain and revenues were so important to the empire. The Mamelukes, largely Circassian slaves recruited into the administration and army, continued the recruitment system devised by Ibrahim Pasha in the 1520s; by the start of the seventeenth century the Mameluke beys were powerful enough to depose Ottoman governors, and only dissunion and rivalries allowed the Porte to regain a measure of control later that century. Even then, Mameluke weakness tended to enhance the power of the local military. When an Ottoman pasha was deposed and imprisoned by the leading bey in 1740, the Porte insisted on his reinstatement. ‘A watery command’, as the Ottomans said themselves: when the beys held firm, they sent a replacement, Ali Pasha, who had served as Grand Vizier in Constantinople. His emollient address before the court which heard the reading of the firman confirming his investiture ran:

  I have not come to Egypt to sow discord between the emirs, nor dissension among the inhabitants. My mission is to safeguard everyone’s rights. The Sultan, our master, has ceded me the territory of this country – and I in turn make it over to you. Only, do not make difficulties for me in the paying of dues.

  * And some of the largest ships, too, argosies, or ragusea.

  * Later reinterpreted to cover the hordes of Romanian (and often gypsy) violinists who serenaded European restaurant goers in the 1920s and 1930s, and are back again at last.

  * The French, however, occupied Tunisia in 1881.

  24

  The Auspicious Event

  On 7 April 1789, fifteen years after the disastrous treaty of Kucuk Kainardji had opened the way to Russian intervention in Ottoman affairs, Sultan Abdulhamid I died of a stroke, and was succeeded by his nephew Selim. Selim had spent his life in Cage confinement like all other sultans, but he had been allowed an education (his musical compositions are occasionally aired today on Istanbul radio). His young cousins, Mustafa and Mahmut, took his place in the Cage, where they enjoyed similar freedoms; they were later to rule as Mustafa IV and Mahmut II. Selim had few illusions about the empire’s glaring weaknesses.

  By the end of the eighteenth century the empire’s military prowess had dried up. Her existence was to be prolonged only by the reluctance of the Great Powers to see her carved up and delivered to their own enemies. At Tilsit, where Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met in 1807 to share out the world, they divided up the empire between them – unable quite to resolve the problem of Constantinople itself, which the Russians wanted as the capital of a restored Byzantine Empire; the French would only agree to this if they might have control of the Dardanelles. Within a few years the French would have burned Moscow, and Russian guns would have laid Paris open, while ‘the house of Othman proceeded to complete its fourth century of unbroken dominion at Constantinople’.

  The empire in those Napoleonic years was tugged into strange alliances: now with the Russians, now with the French. In 1798 a joint Russo-Ottoman fleet sailing to assist France’s enemies on the Italian coast produced the sublime spectacle of the forces of the Russian Tsar and of the Sultan-Caliph co-operating in support of the Pope. In 1805, with the aid of the British, Ottoman troops landed all along the Syrian coast and retook Acre. In Serbia in 1810, they allied with the reaya, the Christian peasantry, against the janissaries. In 1826 they called in the Egyptians to quell the nationalist rebellion in Greece.* In every one of these encounters, their allies praised the fighting spirit and martial qualities of the Ottoman troops, disparaged their commanders, and despaired of their training, organisation and equipment. ‘They march in heaps, fight without order,’ Rycaut had noticed in 1699; Napoleon called them ‘an Asiatic rabble’ and, when not seeking their help, was content, as at Acre, to have his Ottoman prisoners led out to a field and shot. And when the British were threatening to sail up the Dardanelles to impress upon the Porte the desirability of not acting with the French in 1805, the reaction of the French adviser in the city was to sort out the ordinance in the Bosphorus forts, while the Ottoman vizier had the forts painted very white, to give his enemies the impression that they were all newly fitted up.

  Selim called up a sheaf of memos on the origins of his state’s decline, and reopened the old correspondence with the King of France. Not every effort towards reform had been abandoned in the eighteenth century. Count Bonneval arrived in 1729, and in 1731 he asked to reform the Bombardier Corps. A school of geometry opened for him in 1734. It was soon closed down when the janissaries began to grumble, but it appears to have reopened secretly in 1759.In 1773 a new maths school was established for the navy, with the help of a French officer, Baron de Tott, and a Scots renegade called Campbell, known as Ingiliz Mustafa. One of Selim’s first acts was to develop a new Artillery Corps along lines laid down by Baron de Tott. When the janissaries resisted all efforts to reform their training and discipline Selim developed, side by side with them, a New Order infantry who were trained by western officers, and even accoutred in European style.

  The Sultan was neither a fool nor a coward, but he lost confidence when the leaders of the established army, with ulema support, rebelled in Edirne on 20 June 1806. The New Order troops were taken from their commanders and placed under the command of a rebel, Alemdar Mustafa Pasha. A year later the janissaries and the religious students of Constantinople stormed the palace, and seventeen New Order officers were handed over to the mob, who stuck their heads on poles outside the palace walls. Once again, the sacrifice was vain: on 29 May 1807 the Grand Mufti answered the rebels’ demands with a fatwa deposing Selim. The unhappy Sultan was returned to the Cage in favour of Mustafa IV, who was already mentally ill. Once again the janissaries, true to form, went on the rampage through the streets, killing anyone still wearing the New Order uniform, and looting with impunity.

  But two years spent with the remnants of the New Order troops on the Danube had swung Alemdar Mustafa Pasha round to Selim’s orginal position on reform. On 1 July 1808 he marched his army into Constantinople, secured the city and, surrounding the palace on 7 July, demanded Selim’s restoration. Mustafa had sufficent sense to secure himself as the sole surviving male of the House of Osman: Selim, after a furious struggle, was stabbed to death by the Chief Black Eunuch and his men in his mother’s apartment. When Alemdar forced his way into the second court of the palace bellowing for Sultan Selim, he was met by Mustafa, coldly commanding his men to show the seraskier the body. Mustafa must have supposed, by then, that his brother Mahmut too had been murdered on his orders; but when Alemdar’s soldiers had seized Mustafa the youth emerged from his hiding place. The Grand Mufti was persuaded to issue a fatwa deposing Sultan Mustafa, and Mahmut II, aged twenty-three, was proclaimed Sultan.

  Not for eighteen years was Sultan Mahm
ut II in a position to deal with the open scandal of the janissary corps. For years he had been quietly appointing loyal men to high office; the janissary aga was one of his supporters, and a troop of artillerymen, some 10,000 strong, had been raised independently of the janissaries, and drilled along western lines. In eighteen years Mahmut had managed to break the power of the overweening barons of Anatolia and the Balkans by exploiting a series of fortuitous deaths, a rash of family quarrels, and judicious force: the heads of Ali Pasha of Albania and his sons were being displayed in a neat circle at the gate of the Seraglio.

  Alemdar, his liberator, champion and first Grand Vizier, had not lasted very long. In November 1808, barely five months after his dramatic entry into the capital, Alemdar fell victim to janissary wrath. He had attempted to reinstitute Selim’s army reforms by creating yet another modern army, the so-called Segbani Cedit. Besieged by the janissaries in the Porte he retired to a powder magazine which exploded with massive loss of life, Alemdar’s included. The Segbani Cedit held off the rebels from the Topkapi, with the support of the navy, whose erratic firing from ships on the Golden Horn did little to cool the rebels’ ardour, but started house fires which swept through the city, killing thousands. Supported by the angry mob, the janissaries put the palace under siege, stopping the water supply. In this crisis, Mahmut had Mustafa strangled, as Mustafa had so recently had Selim stabbed to death. At length, as the last living Ottoman prince, Mahmut signed an agreement with the janissaries, mediated by the ulema, which allowed him to keep his throne in return for disbanding the Segban Cedit. Despite guarantees of safe conduct, these loyal soldiers were hacked to pieces as they left the palace, and various other notables who had supported them were murdered.