Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  Further east, almost the opposite criticism was levelled by the Wahhabis, regressive puritan followers of the Nejdi Arab scholar Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab. Wahhab had built up a following among the tribes of the Nejd, led by the ruling Saud family of the town of Diriyah. While Wahhab himself had died a few years before, the fanatical fervour of his followers was inexorably drawn to the Empire. They criticised what they argued was the Sultans making a mockery of the caliphal office and appointing imams based on political corruption rather than due Islamic process.[275]

  Meanwhile, Egypt slumbered under the Mamelukes.[276] The Wali, Ibrahim Bey, was ageing and beset by troubles. The Funj Sultanate of Sennar under the uncomfortably vigorous Sultan Unsa IV was snapping at Egypt’s holdings in Nubia[277] and Ibrahim also had political problems closer to home. Although Europe would not make a concerted effort against Barbary piracy until the formation of the ICPA in 1817, there were concerns in Cairo that the Mediterranean was becoming an increasingly unfriendly place. The establishment of new countries such as the Republic of Corsica, the Kingdom of Aragon and the Republic (later Kingdom) of Italy during the Jacobin Wars, together with the destruction of Venice and the dispersal of its navy, created a fertile, chaotic ground for pirates operating out of the Deylicate of Algiers. The Dey, Baba Ismail Pasha, had been appointed by the last Grand Vizier before Damat Melek Pasha, Mehmed Ali Pasha, and regarded himself as a political enemy of Damat. To that end, Baba Ismail deliberately backed the Barbary pirates to raid European shipping, hoping to spark a war that would force Constantinople to be drawn in and create the political circumstances under which Damat might fall. In that he was unsuccessful, as while the Europeans indeed eventually took action against the pirates, it would not come to pass until Damat was already dead and the Time of Troubles had come.

  The Mamelukes were nervous about being caught up in the middle of such a contest of wills between the Dey and the Vizier, and two political factions were generated, each broadly in support of Baba Ismail or Damat – though this is a slight simplification, as the ‘supporters’ of Baba Ismail were usually more inclined to pursue Egyptian autonomy or even independence alongside Algiers, rather than backing Baba Ismail to overthrow Damat within the structure of the Ottoman Empire.[278]

  Finally there were those, mostly in Anatolia and some in Roumelia,[279] who cared little for political liberty or Islamic purity but demanded military reforms based on stark realism; it was obvious that the Jacobin Wars had unleashed new weapons and tactics upon the world, and unless the Ottomans adapted they would be devastated in any future war with a power that had learned its lessons. Certainly, the Austrians were just as resistant to change (which helped Damat’s supporters at court) – but the Russians seemed far too intrigued by steam engines. This opposition group was perhaps the least coherent and organised of the opposition to Damat, but it was also the most numerous, most significant, and closest to home. Some of its figures were too senior for Damat to have easily… removed, and instead he appointed them as officials to far-flung parts of the Empire. Two figures among the many who took this route should be highlighted. One was an Albanian named Esad Ali Bey, who was sent to Oman to act as court resident; the Ottomans had extended considerable influence into Oman during and after the Turco-Persian War, helping to draw the Sultanate into Constantinople’s orbit. He immediately became known for writing a widely-praised sefaretname (a genre of Ottoman literature consisting of a journal written by an ambassador about the foreign land he was sent to) which meant his name was ever mentioned at court, much to Damat’s discomfort.

  The second was a more mysterious figure. His ancestry is uncertain, and though both Greeks and Armenians have attempted to claim him, in reality it seems most likely that he was a simple Ottoman Turk from Constantinople. He was young, but had powerful relatives and protectors, so Damat sent him to Egypt in an obviously sabotaged attempt to enforce Ottoman power in the uncertain climate there.

  His name was Abdul Hadi Bey.

  *

  The death of Damat Melek Pasha in 1816 threw the Empire into a kind of power struggle it had rarely known in the past. The Grand Vizier had dominated politics at the court for so long that opposition forces were sluggish to respond, and confusion and terror reigned as the Janissaries tried to launch a pre-emptive coup against any reformist attempt to take the vizierate. Sultan Ahmed IV was assassinated in the street in a shocking incident whose circumstances are obscure. Various reformist groups have been implicated, but it has also been suggested that some Janissaries or other reactionaries did the deed, even though it may seem against their best interests; by this point the old guard was so paranoid that even the harmless, pliable Ahmed might seem a potential risk.

  If there is any truth to that idea, it seems likely that those Janissaries were young, headstrong and not close to the core Janissary leadership, which communicated through the Sufi Order of the Bektashi Brotherhood, a mystical and heterodox society at the heart of their class. In any case, Constantinople was plunged into chaos. With no Sultan and no Grand Vizier, terror reigned. Damat’s absolutist rule meant that there were no conceivable nearby candidates to take over the vizierate. The Janissary Agha (chief), Kara Suleyman Pasha, attempted to seize the post despite his lack of charisma and brutal unpopularity with the people (Damat had used him as the Timothy in his Him-and-me strategy).[280] At the same time, the next heir to the throne, Mahmud III, was brought out of the Kafes despite being completely mad and suicidal. It speaks of the situation in the City that even though Mahmud III continually did his best to cut his wrist with any sharp object within reach, he still lasted three days longer than Kara Suleyman Pasha, brought down by a mob yelling Wahhabi slogans that overcame his bodyguard of lax Janissaries.

  The next Sultan in line, Murad VI, was no fool. A relatively young man, the nephew of Ahmed IV, he left the Kafes and then pulled off a daring escape with the assistance of the influence of the women at court. The Janissaries, their own leadership in flux, went through two more Sultans before they found a sufficiently pliable boy, the claimant Mehmed V, to take the throne. A Janissary leader, Alemdar Huseyin Mustafa Pasha, managed to get himself proclaimed Grand Vizier and then issued proclamations that the so-called Murad VI must be hunted down and imprisoned again, so that the rule of the rightful Sultan Mehmed would not be afflicted. This was met with bafflement by many who could see that Mehmed couldn’t even rule Constantinople, never mind the Empire. An Empire whose component parts all boasted their own anti-establishment movements which had simmered resentfully under Damat’s long rule, and now exploded into life.

  What transpired next was in many ways a precursor to the Popular Wars that would soon strike Europe, as Mikhail Leonov notes in his Riding the Storm. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire into a many-sided civil war was complicated, defied description and understanding even to its contemporaries both within and without, and its result seemed unknowable. What seems certain is that if one were to approach a Turk of 1817 or so with the knowledge of how it did turn out, he would very likely laugh at you…

  *

  Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.

  I regret to report that the above transmission was sent without my knowledge by Drs Lombardi and Pylos in direct contravention of my orders. I fear our precautions are now made worthless and we may have made ourselves known…

  Sir, I am requesting a Code Delta. It is my judgement that it is required and I will take full responsibility if a court of inquiry decides otherwise.

  Sir, please. Those two don’t know what they’re getting us into. Maybe they know up here, but not, not… really. I don’t want to end up like what happened to Davydov’s squad.

  I’m sorry sir, that was unprofessional… sending transmission now–

  Chapter #100: ___NO TITLE ENTERED___

  #########said that the most dangerous men in the world are those who create great ideas. In fact I would say that the most dangerous men are those who, by some devilry, may reduce reality to ideas, and
then persuade others that this lie is the truth…

  - George Spen###########ger####925 speech

  *

  From: “Pablo Sanchez: A New Life”, by Raoul ############# 2003)—

  As I have stated (probably with little need) throughout ###### attempting to provide a historically accurate account of the life of Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz is a task that might charitably be described as ‘completely impossible’. I do not speak merely of the efforts of censorship on the part of the members of the Assembly of Sovereign Nations, whether state-mandated or otherwise, which have made it increasingly difficult to build up a picture of the father of Societism as anything other than the incarnation of Lucifer the peoples of the world now regard him as. Of course, nor was Sanchez the messianic figure the Combine painted him as. He was a man. No more, no less. A good or evil man? Can the life of any man be reduced to such simple categories, particularly when one factors in what was done in his name after his death? I say not. Let us cast aside the vitriol of mainstream thought and instead attempt a humanistic analysis of the man who defined a century which dawned long after he died.

  ############### birthplace in Cervera, in Catalonia.null His father, ############# 1807 ######### collaborator and his entire family were killed by the townsfolk – save Pablo himself, of course. As a ten-year-old he was recruited by a band of Spanish Kleinkriegers as a drummer boy and ###### The next years are obscure, and of course in the middle of the nineteenth century many grey-haired frauds were ready to step forward and claim that they had been Sanchez’s good friend and taught him all he knew. It has reached the point that the actual record has been covered over by layer upon layer of lies; what little record even existed in the first place, for who cared about a drummer boy in a ragged band of Kleinkriegers not even significant enough to earn a song or painting? It is known that the Kleinkrieger band was folded into a regular Aragonese regiment by the Neapolitans after the partition of Spain in 1808, but ############# and under those circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Sanchez jumped ship. A poor choice of metaphor, perhaps, given what happened next.

  Sanchez next surfaces in Castile in 1815, working as a minor clerk in a bank in Santander. As a mayor’s son in Cervera he would presumably have received a good basic education which qualified him for the role. There are vague unconfirmed reports that he expressed interest in the revolutionary ‘new science’ that the French officers he was friendly with would occasionally expound upon, but there is still a gap here; he lost his family and was pulled into a Kleinkrieger group at the age of ten, while ############### without further education. There is a much less reliable report (but widely believed by my predecessors as biographers) that Sanchez had previously worked in Saragossa as an adolescent after leaving the Aragonese army. The obvious implication was that he might have learned something from the university students there he would presumably have come into contact with.null This is very much guesswork, however, and should not be regarded as canonical history.

  ####### exacerbated by the fact that Sanchez himself was always vague about his early years. Some have claimed this was an attempt to cover up a dark secret (making a pact with the Devil if you believe the Tsar’s propagandists), but I believe that it was simply an aspect of the man he was. Sanchez did not set pen to paper to write anything more profound than a ship’s inventory before he was thirty; frustratingly, there are no (genuine) contemporary diaries or personal musings concerning any of the events that he would later recount in his major works. Furthermore, in those works they serve purely as examples, in which Sanchez himself is at best reduced to a colourless narrator who observes the incidents without becoming involved in them – which seems rather unlikely based on what we know about his character in later life. ######################## quite simply believed that he himself was of no interest, and by the time he was writing, his head was too filled with ideas, like a bubbling coffee-pot, to concern himself with clearing up his own origins.

  In any case, a (slightly) more coherent record of Sanchez’s life begins with his decision to join the Portuguese East India Company in 1817 at the age of twenty. Once more, how he got from Santander to Lisbon is unclear, but he appears to have been working as a bank clerk once more before joining the Company. ############ have suggested that it was this background in finance that discouraged Sanchez from making much commentary on advanced economics in the otherwise bold and radical strokes of his later writings which sought to completely turn the world upside down (and did, if not perhaps in the way he intended). It does appear odd that at a time when the merits of the gold and silver standards were being debated and concerns over whether finance should serve the state, the rich or the people as a whole would spark some of the more minor elements of the Popular Wars, Sanchez remained largely silent. ############# rather black humour to suggest that his work there convinced him that there was one area, perhaps, where mankind could never come to an agreement.

  ##### reasons for joining the Company, though much speculated upon, have never been satisfactorily explained, and I am forced to resort to the very dull standard justification that he did it to escape the black memories of his past, his parents’ murder and the rough life he had endured with the Kleinkriegers. Whether he deliberately sought out the exotic locales that he would voyage to is a more problematic question, and highlights the fact that any attempt to acquire a biographical portrait of a historical individual is usually hampered by the assumption that a man never changes throughout life. ###### indeed a reason then what happened to Sanchez might be considered an even more profound change than is already recognised, but ## unclear.

  Whatever his reasons, Sanchez joined the Company and after eighteen months continuing to work in his clerical role in one of the Company offices in Lisbon, he boarded the East Indiaman Centauro bound for Goa via Brazil. What few reports from his supervisors which have not been wildly distorted by one side or the other ########## but unimaginative’. It was a time of great expansion for the Portuguese in India, with the Maratha War weakening the two great Maratha houses of Scindia and Holkar and allowing the Portuguese-backed puppet Peshwa to assert more authority over the Confederacy.null ########### ‘Indian Board’ was foundednull and its early meetings would have some influence on Sanchez’s life.

  It is known that the Centauro, thanks to bad weather in the Bay of Biscay, stopped in Dakar in order to purchase more canvas to repair a sail. Returning to Portugal would probably have been easier, but the Centauro’s cocky captain, Fernão de Sintra, saw such an action as returning with his tail between his legs and sought an alternative that would preserve his pride. On such petty decisions does the world turn…

  Due to his background and financial position, Sanchez was drafted in by the ship’s quartermaster to help negotiate for the canvas needed. Sintra had hoped to obtain what he needed from Portuguese Cachau further south, ####################### Sanchez found himself negotiating with blacks from the Freedonia Colony.null He found that the Freedes viewed him with deep suspicion, as they did all Spaniards and Portuguese. After asking what (by report) were questions of quite child-like innocence, one of the Freedish merchants, a man named Jonathan Quimbo, told him about the slave trade.

  Some have suggested that it was at this moment that ######## but I would argue that, while the incident was obviously of great importance and quoted prominently by Sanchez in Unity Through Society, he did not truly recognise the import of it until the contrast of the later Brazilian affair. It is also worth noting that some scholars have pointed out that Sanchez may have witnessed an unusually rosy treatment of blacks ############## height of the Dahomey Revolt against the Oyo Empire, when the British Royal Africa Company was recruiting many more jagun null and in particular was allowing educated blacks from Freedonia to serve as officers in its army. ##### else only exaggeration.

  The Centauro, equipped with new (and rather overpriced) sails, then sailed on to Brazil. In support of my point above, there is no record of Sanchez having been unusual
ly thoughtful on this voyage, whereas the diary of Second Lieutenant Duarte Álvares (one of the most precious sources for any biographer of Sanchez’s early life) does make two mentions of him seeming ‘not himself’ on the outbound voyage to Goa afterwards. ########################## beneath our consideration.

  Initially the Centauro went into port at Porto dos Casais in what was then the south of Brazil.null The unrest there meant that Captain Sintra had to offload his cargo of manufactured goods further south, in Montevideo. ########################viduals have cited this as ‘evidence of chronological confusion’ due to the fact that King John VI would not ascend the throne of Portugal until 1821 and would not embark on his policy of “Rédea do Rei” until the year after. Such ############## that the southern provinces of Portuguese Brazil were already restless even before John abolished the Cortes in Bahia. The Cortes’ representation moderated the southerners’ distaste for the way they were disadvantaged within the Viceroyalty by high internal trade tariffs, but it was not the cure-all some have sugge##########