Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  Upon the overthrow of Selim, and Alemdar’s intervention, the ulema had largely supported the janissary reign of misrule, preferring conservative anarchy to innovation and reform; but by 1826 the janissaries had managed to alienate these powerful allies, and even the common people of the capital were against them. The janissaries robbed shopkeepers. They extorted protection money. They opened their own shops and forced suppliers to bring them stock at ridiculously low prices. They muscled in on respectable trades and turned them into rackets, delivering a hundred bricks for the price of a thousand. They respected nobody. They spread their cloaks on the ground at Easter and made Christians pay to walk across them. They sang obscene songs to the guitar as the Friday procession to the mosque passed by, and robbed the kadi of Istanbul. Janissary watchmen set fire to houses, looted them and raped the women. In the countryside they descended on villages like brigands. Above all, they were quite incapable of fighting, even when the battle was not being waged against modern armies, but against infidel rebels in Greece.

  The long struggle with the Greek rebels at Missolonghi, begun in 1822 and brought to an end in 1826, was the culmination of forty years of Balkan repression and misrule. The Serbs, under Kara George, had been the first nation to raise the standard of revolt in 1804, though theirs was, at least initially, sponsored by the Ottoman government, which had lost control of Serbia to a janissary junta stationed in Belgrade. The idea of rousing the nations of south-eastern Europe to break from Ottoman rule had sprung up everywhere in the final quarter of the eighteenth century – among admirers of the French Revolution of 1789, among Philhellenes like Byron, and principally in Russia, where the court had long cherished the hope of creating an Orthodox empire under Russian tutelage, and perhaps even of restoring a Russo-Byzantine empire in Constantinople. Catherine the Great had gone so far as to have her grandson, Constantine, tutored in Greek and groomed for the office of Byzantine Emperor as soon as the Greeks should demand him. In 1771, however, a Russian attempt to trigger off a rebellion in Greece fell apart amid recriminations and reprisals: the Greeks had failed to fight, the Russians had failed to support them, and after thousands of Muslims had been slaughtered the Russians backed off, and left the Greeks to the tender mercies of Albanian irregulars.

  The Napoleonic Wars, in which the Porte was harried from one unsuitable alliance to another, saw the empire’s extremities twisted and wrung by all the powers in combat. Egypt suffered a French invasion in 1798; and when Mehmet Ali finally beat off the French, the British showed signs of meaning to replace them. Part of the Dalmatian coast fell under French suzerainty; and the Ionian islands, in the western Aegean, remained British protectorates for fifty years.* The Russians invaded the Principalities, and gave great encouragement to the Serbian rebels, who were able to pluck a promise of autonomy from the peace concluded in 1812. Revolutionary aspirations – for glory, for country, for equality – were spread abroad by the belligerents’ propaganda; and local rebellions were increasingly marked by nationalism. Greek aspirations resurfaced. The Hetira was the first of those shadowy organisations which were to thrive in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century, of which IMRO, the Bulgar-inspired Macedonian terrorist organisation whose follower Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot at Sarajevo in 1914, was the most notorious.

  The most impressive feature of Ottoman rule was its opposition to the thin inadequacies of national identification. The Ottoman system made no national distinctions; and truly there were few to be made with any clarity. Language was a very uncertain indication of nationality. The men of Koritza, for example, looked identical, lived in the same round huts, and wore the same blue robes though different groups of them spoke Greek, Vlach and Albanian. With Greek and Turkish the only official languages of the empire, you could easily find Albanian families in the capital who only spoke Turkish; notional Bulgars who had nothing but Greek. Race was meaningless. Southern Albanians looked more like Greeks than Albanians from the north, whose language they shared – and when the Greeks did achieve independence they adopted as their national dress the outfit Byron had admired as the epitome of Albanian elegance. Every man could be made, the Ottomans believed; the claims of nationality were merely spurious; and as a western observer drily remarked, ‘one is tempted to believe that wherever there are three Bulgarians, two will combine against the third, and the third call in foreign assistance’.

  Nationalism was a pretence, like the construct of the empire which it came to overthrow. As soon as nationhood became the cry, the principles on which each nation based its identity could be cobbled together ad hoc from a smorgasbord of history, religion, middle-class notions of propriety, brigand notions of honour, foreign intervention, Ottoman inanition, military audacity, energetic tyrants, slothful pashas, ambitious professors of philology, greed, despair, and ridiculous youthful heroism. The Albanians only developed a sense of nationhood by the skin of their teeth, mobilising a scratch army of philologists and forgotten national heroes just in time to prevent their country being completely overrun by Greece and Serbia shortly before the First World War. The Bulgarians took Ottoman architecture of the late nineteenth century and smugly recaptioned it as National Revival Style; and almost every visitor to independent Greece complained that the Greeks seemed to have grafted all that was tinniest about the West onto a residue of all that was underhand and disagreeable in the Ottoman world. Politics in the successor states was generally unsavoury; the peasants found themselves oppressed by law, not chance, as Urquhart had predicted; and a shoal of German aristocrats were drafted in, to rule over countries which could ill afford their style, among people whose language they could not speak.

  It was Sultan Mahmut, though, who called in foreign assistance first. Egypt, it is true, remained in name a vassal state, and was ruled by a cunning Albanian, Mehmet Ali, in the imperial manner; but under Ali everything had changed, and by the 1820s Egypt was the most progressive and efficient state in the entire region. In 1801 Ali had rebuffed the French; five years later he repulsed the British; in 1811 he overcame the Egyptian notables and suppressed a fundamentalist Arab revolt in the Wahhab. The ulema were delighted: they had hated the infidels, mistrusted the Mamelukes and resented Wahhabite control over the Holy Cities. Ali, though, went further. Egypt had been occupied by the French for three years, and French administration had proved startlingly efficient by Ottoman standards. With the revenues of a rich country nimbly gathered into his hands, and little to fear from Constantinople, Mehmet Ali had begun to modernise and westernise his country. The army he inherited refused to reform, and in 1823 Ali had turned, instead, to peasant conscripts, the Egyptian fellahin, drilled by French officers left behind after Napoleon’s adventure. The national army – a wholly new concept in the Ottoman Empire – soon showed its paces in Greece, under his son Ibrahim Pasha. In 1825, as the struggle for Missolonghi entered its third year, Ibrahim landed at Modon in the southern Peloponnese, defying the prognosis of Greek seamen who declared that an Egyptian army could not hope to cross the sea in winter, and brought 10,000 men with horses and artillery to sweep up the rebels of the Peloponnese. In April 1826, having crossed the Gulf of Corinth, the Egyptians finally dislodged the defenders of Misso-longhi – where Byron had died in 1824.

  With that, it was reasonable to suppose that the Greek affair was over. Mahmut’s tasks were now to deal with his overmighty Egyptian vassals, and at the same time provide himself with an army as modern and well-disciplined as theirs. In May 1826 the Grand Vizier, leading jurists and senior army officers meeting in the house of the Sheikh ul-Islam hammered out a decree which foisted a great number of reforms on the Janissary Corps. The Grand Vizier, himself a respectable old soldier, briskly described a corps riddled with adventurers and with Greeks, all of them afraid of war. Their faith, he added tactfully, was weak; in them the spirit of gazidom was dead; and they neglected the old laws of discipline. These were charges which the ulema themselves could support, and when the decree which stipulated prayers, disc
ipline, regular training, punishment, pensions, systems of promotion, numbers and organisation of the corps was finally read out, with a rider that all evil or blind men who muttered or frustrated the Sultan’s order should be punished, the Sheikh ul-Islam actually cried out: ‘Aye! And severely!’

  Drawn up in the courtyard of the janissary aga’s residence the janissary officers, after an awful pause, surged forward to put their signatures to the decree, and swear obedience. As soon as the first reorganised regiment began to drill, the janissaries began to foment their inevitable mutiny. Various officers were with them, despite their signatures on the decree; and if they failed to revolt immediately it was because, according to janissary tradition, a revolt had to be signalled by the overturning of the cauldrons.

  A month passed. On the night of 15 June 1826, three days before the Sultan had demanded that the janissaries should parade before him in western uniforms and to western drill, the janissary conspirators began assembling, in twos and threes, upon the Atmaidan. The cauldrons were lugged from the barracks and piled up. By morning a huge crowd had spilled out of the Atmaidan and various detachments of janissaries were prowling the streets, calling for blood. The Grand Vizier was told that they refused to perform ‘infidel’ exercises, and that they demanded the heads of the men responsible for the decree: by their pyramid of cauldrons the janissaries believed, it seems, that their mutiny was already successful. The Grand Vizier only replied that Allah would crush them.

  Mahmut was kept informed of the course of events at his summer palace up the Bosphorus, and before long he was back in the palace, where the pashas and ulema together urged ‘Victory or death!’ The Sultan himself unfurled the black banner of the Prophet, while criers went out across the city, and to Pera and Uskudar, calling on loyal citizens to rally to his cause. It was hardly necessary. In the first court of the palace, a near riot had to be quelled by an equerry when latecomers discovered that all the weapons in the armoury had been handed out already to the medrese students.

  The unfurling of the standard disturbed the janissaries, who sent a group of officers to negotiate the terms of a pardon while at the same time they moved to block off all approaches to the Atmaidan. The Grand Vizier dismissed the delegation; two cannon riddled a company of janissaries by the Horhor fountain with grapeshot. Fleeing to the Atmaidan, the janissaries moved back to their barracks en masse and barracaded themselves in, using heavy stones, and abandoning many of their companions still roving the streets. It cannot be known how far the rebels supposed the authorities would go, for no one survived the barrage of artillery which now rained down on the door of the barracks. Before long the building was on fire, and those who survived the shelling perished in the flames.

  There were still many janissaries hiding out in parts of the city. Some are supposed to have taken refuge in the stoke-holes of the Constantinople baths, where they survived on food smuggled to them by stubborn well-wishers.* Some reached the Belgrade forest in a suburb of Constantinople, where long ago Mehmet the Conqueror had settled large numbers of Serbs during his repopulation of the capital. Loyal officers toured the city in disguise, pointing out janissaries for the executioner. The bodies of hundreds of soldiers were flung under the Janissary Tree on the Hippodrome. Part of the Belgrade forest was torched to smoke them out. Perhaps 10,000 men were killed on the first day. The city was placed under effective martial law, and on Friday 16 June 1826 the firman abolishing every vestige of the Janissary Corps was issued from the divan and read from the mimbars at noon prayers. Tartar cavalrymen were sent to the provinces, with orders to the governors to remove every cauldron from the janissary units stationed under them, as government property, and to chase the soldiers out of the country. Their very name was never to be mentioned again.

  Janissary headstones, topped by the cocky turban of the order, were knocked over. Perhaps a thousand men were executed, including notorious criminals and rebel ringleaders, but the ordinary janissaries, on the whole, survived by keeping their heads down and looking for menial jobs. Addison found a couple of former janissaries, who had broken their silence, in a lunatic asylum in the 1830s, and many years later a former janissary was found living in Damascus, making walking sticks. He presented one to the governor every year and claimed to be 150 years old. His memory of events was excellent up to 1826, after which he remembered nothing at all.

  In return for their support the ulema were given a new mosque, the Divine Victory; the Sheikh ul-Islam received the former palace of the janissary aga; and the Bektashi dervish order was formally, but ineffectively, abolished. Historic tekkes where the dervishes assembled were converted into mosques, and their dervishes were either exiled or joined other heterodox movements. In the long term this may have been a loss to the Ottoman government, for Sufis preached, on the whole, a disregard for the manifest conditions of this world, and their influence was stabilising.

  A further ironic consequence of the destruction of the janissaries, the so-called Auspicious Event, was Greek independence. The arrival of Egyptian troops in Greece had finally prompted the intervention of the Great Powers. Unprovided now with even the shadow of an army, the Sultan lost his navy, too, at Navarino off the Peloponnese, on 20 October 1827. After Navarino the ease with which the Sultan could be browbeaten by the allies – Russians invaded both eastern Anatolia and Thrace, and took Edirne in August 1829 – led inevitably to an independent Greece, established under western auspices in 1830; a Greek kingdom was proclaimed in 1833.

  The episode set the framework in which the great Eastern Question was posed: Russia had always been seeking to move south, in her famous desire for a warm-water fleet – a prospect nobody else welcomed. Austria thought principally of protecting her own polyglot empire in Central Europe, a policy which would ultimately make Hungary and Bosnia into bastions of Austrian influence. But Napoleon’s pretensions in the eastern Mediterranean, where the French hoped to capitalise on their old traditions of trade, had triggered Britain’s fears for her overland connections with India. Both had come to perceive the potential benefit of a ring of client states, first in the Egyptian mould, and now in the Greek: states sufficiently small to be easily influenced, sufficiently multifarious to preserve easy checks and balances in the region, and sufficiently westernised to offer both markets and supplies to European commerce and manufacture. After the victorious Russian advance through Moldavia and into Thrace, it was Anglo-French intransigence that prevented the Russians from establishing an overt Balkan hegemony. In the peace of 1830 the Greeks got independence, Moldavia, Wallachia and Serbia were given autonomy, and Russia had to be satisfied with Bessarabia.

  As the price of his own assistance to the Porte in Greece, Mehmet Ali of Egypt demanded powers which the Porte was unwilling to give, but powerless itself to resist. Along with his radical reforms of the military, Ali had modernised the Egyptian administration, encouraged the development of new industries, and confiscated Mameluke and vakif lands which the state then apportioned to the peasants, who were told what they were to grow, and how. Ali was chasing western markets, and he opened Egyptian society to the West, sending students to Europe, and creating a new, secular education system. His success gave Sultan Mahmut a powerful model to follow, until it almost seemed that the two rulers were engaged in a race to westernise the societies they controlled. Only Ali’s Egypt, however, fitted the western, national ideal.

  An Egyptian army under Ali’s son Ibrahim took Syria and Palestine in the summer of 1832, and approached Constantinople in early 1833 to force Mahmut to accept Mehmet Ali’s terms. The Sultan turned to the only other military power capable of resisting them: the arch-enemy, Russia. Russian troops occupied Constantinople in the spring of 1833, as the Sultan’s protectors; Ibrahim was bought off with a treaty that left him and his father in control of the Middle East; the Russians wrung an agreement that closed the Bosphorus to foreign warships in time of war, to the alarm of the British and the French; and the entire episode set up reverberations of absurdi
ty and dependence which were to echo for the remainder of the empire’s days.

  * During which campaign, it is said, Ottoman gunners created the first cigarette, rolling the baccy in their touch papers after their clay pipe was shattered by enemy fire; and so bequeathing to the footsloggers of the world the supreme comfort of military life.

  * During which time they were governed by the delightful Lord Newgate, who founded a university in which everyone was attired in Attic costume, and who was to be seen in Pall Mall wearing purple buskins, yellow leggings and snow-white robes in the 1820s.

  * They allegedly composed the threnodies which can still be heard, the songs of the Men of the Stoke-Hole, the Kulhan Beyler, lamenting the great old days of janissary power.

  25

  The Bankrupt

  In an address to new medical students in 1838, the Sultan declared: ‘My purpose in having you taught French is not to educate you in the French language; it is to teach you scientific medicine and little by little to take it into our language,’ and it did seem that the Sultan had the power to sift even the language from the ideas it tended to express. After the destruction of the janissaries, Mahmut was free to institute reforms wherever he pleased. With his loyal bombardiers, he no longer had to fear the rage of the mob, who could be dispelled by the customary whiff of grapeshot. This drew the ulema’s teeth and enabled Mahmut to start taking control of charitable foundations, something not contemplated since the days of the Conqueror almost four centuries before. Mahmut didn’t actually dispossess these vakifs, it is true; but he put them on file and had their revenues collected centrally, as a first step. By the end of 1826 the only bastion of ancient privilege beyond challenge in the empire was the person of the Sultan himself.