The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The Turks are seldom seen in the Franks’ Street, which is the whole length of the city. When we are in this street, we seem to be in Christendom; they speak nothing but Italian, French, English or Dutch there. Everybody takes off his hat when he pays his respects to another.

  But of all the languages heard on the Street of the Franks, the most common was the Provençal of the merchants of Marseilles, ‘because there are more from Provence than any other parts’. The Christians were free to operate their own taverns, but they did so rather tactlessly, leaving them open all day and all night. Remarkable too was their freedom of worship: ‘they sing publicly in the churches; they sing psalms, preach and perform Divine Service without any trouble’.30 A functioning port city had come into being, in which the needs of trade allowed Muslims, Jews and a variety of Christian sects to coexist side by side: there were three churches used by western Europeans, two for the Greeks and an Armenian church as well. There were several synagogues too, but it was events in the Portuguese synagogue that would set the Jewish world alight in the 1660s; the heat of these flames would be felt by Christians and Muslims as well as Jews.

  The different ethnic and religious groups in Smyrna worked together in business. The merchants of the English Levant Company often employed Jewish agents, and among these there was a decrepit and gouty broker named Mordecai Zevi (often spelled Sevi, Tzvi or Sebi), a Greek Jew who had devoted his early career to the humble task of dealing in eggs.31 He had three sons; two also became brokers, but the third, Shabbetai, began to have extraordinary visions, and became immersed in some of the more abstruse areas of Jewish scholarship. Kabbalistic studies had long flourished, first among the Jews of Spain and, since 1492, among the Sephardim of Safed in Palestine. The rabbis took the view that it was dangerous to study Kabbalah before the age of forty, by which time one should possess the necessary background knowledge and maturity; but this opinion did not dissuade Shabbetai Zevi, who taught himself while still a very young man: ‘he learned everything for himself, for he was one of the four to arrive at the knowledge of the Creator by themselves’, the others being the patriarch Abraham, Hezekiah, king of Judah and Job.32 Descriptions of Shabbetai’s mood swings and conduct leave little doubt that he possessed a bi-polar personality. Self-doubt and introspection were counterbalanced by ecstasy and megalomania. When he declaimed Isaiah’s words, ‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds’, he imagined that he was doing just that, and invited his friends to confirm that he had the power to levitate. They denied having seen him do so. He then ticked them off: ‘You were not worthy to behold this glorious sight because you were not purified like me.’33

  The time seemed right for the coming of the salvation of the people of Israel. In the 1640s, terrible massacres wreaked by the Cossacks in eastern Europe induced a sense of deep crisis among Jews as far away as the Mediterranean, and refugees brought tales of what had happened to the safe havens they found in the Ottoman Empire. The sense of crisis was almost as acute as it had been in 1492, when expulsion from Spain had unleashed earlier Messianic fervour. Shabbetai, now in his twenties, began to reveal himself as a Messianic figure, though there was some ambiguity about who exactly he claimed to be. He set aside centuries of tradition and began to pronounce the four-letter Name of God in synagogue (Jews always substitute the word Adonai, ‘my Lord’), and he began to contradict commandments found in the Torah itself, for example the commandment not to eat the fat around an animal’s kidneys, which had been reserved for the Temple sacrifices. He even uttered this prayer when eating the forbidden food: ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God and king of the universe, who permits that which is forbidden.’ His private life was complicated: his wife Sarah was, frankly, a whore and had earned a little money as a fortune-teller, but this was only to re-enact the career of the prophet Hosea, who had married a prostitute.34 Spending some time in Salonika, he began to recruit followers who were impressed by his prophetic skills and self-assurance. He travelled around the eastern Mediterranean, clearly hoping to win the approval of the Palestinian rabbis whose opinions would be respected across the Jewish world; his most prominent recruit was a noisy Jew from Gaza named Nathan, who became his most persistent advocate. Unfortunately, Shabbetai refused to perform any miracles, even for his followers in Hebron, where the leading Sephardic rabbi, Haim Abulafia, declared: ‘I do not believe the Messiah will come in this way.’35 After all, Shabbetai lacked the credentials of a member of the royal house of David.

  Back in Smyrna, he and his ‘Sabbatian’ followers stormed the Portuguese synagogue in Smyrna on 12 December 1665 and ejected the old leadership. Once he and his adherents had acquired a base for their activities, new festivals were instituted and old ones were cancelled (notably the summer fast commemorating the fall of the Temple, for which there was surely no need if the redemption for which Jews had been praying on that day was now at hand). He called women to the reading of the Torah, a practice then unknown, and entertained the congregation by declaiming an erotic romance in Judaeo-Spanish called Meliselda in which the beautiful daughter of an emperor meets and makes love to a young man: ‘her face a gleaming sword of light, her lips like corals red and bright, her flesh as milk so fair and white’.36 Not that anyone had noticed before, but this song was evidently an allegory of the bond between the Messiah and the Torah, which represented the Divine Presence. The Messiah would be a real king and not just a religious leader, so Shabbetai assumed imperial authority and began to nominate his followers as kings and emperors of such lands as Portugal, Turkey and Rome (the last two posts being reserved for his brothers); it goes without saying that he appeared magnificently arrayed and delighted in the office of ‘king of the Jews’; news of his achievements, if they can be called that, reached Amsterdam in the correspondence of both Sephardic and Christian merchants.37 Far from generating anger, these acts confirmed the belief of his followers that he was the promised Messiah.

  For Christians the meaning of these events, which they assiduously noted, was rather different: ‘God alone knows whether he may be a means of the Conversion of that stiff-necked Generation.’38 The interest of Christian merchants in the growing ferment among the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean (which soon spread to Italy as well) is easier to understand when the roots of Shabbetai’s movement are traced. The way he projected himself as a Messiah who had the power and authority to set aside parts of the old law is reminiscent of the portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. The young Shabbetai had contact, through his father’s business, with English and other Christian merchants in Smyrna. Among them too, apocalyptic ideas had been spreading, for in the 1640s England was a place of religious ferment, as enthusiastic Protestant sects jostled for position, some of them adopting Messianic ideas of their own (to which Oliver Cromwell was by no means immune); these sects read their Old Testaments very closely, and paid careful attention to passages thought to prophesy the Second Coming of Christ. Among these groups were the Fifth Monarchy Men, precursors of the Quakers, whose own origins were full of apocalyptic expectation.39 Another movement that influenced Christian merchants, and, indirectly, Shabbetai Zevi, was the ‘Rosicrucian enlightenment’, a system of abstruse knowledge, including alchemy, which was spread by the printed word in the early seventeenth century.40 The origins of this movement lay in Germany, wracked by the Thirty Years’ War, but its tenets attracted men of science across northern Europe. The trade routes that carried Smyrna cotton to England brought esoteric ideas in return.

  Yet Shabbetai Zevi’s activities were centred on the Ottoman parts of the Mediterranean, and it is no surprise that his name came to the notice of the sultan. Here was a Jewish subject who had made his own brother ‘king of Turkey’; and in the synagogues of his followers the traditional prayer for the sovereign had been modified so that, instead of asking for God’s blessing on the sultan, the congregation prayed for ‘our Messiah, the anointed of the God of Joseph, the celestial lion and celestial stag, the Messiah of righteousness, the king o
f kings, the sultan Shabbetai Zevi’.41 The vizier, Fazıl Ahmet Pasha, had fallen under the influence of a puritanical branch of Islam that scorned other religions; he had been occupied with war against the Venetians in Crete, but now turned his master’s attention to this troublesome prophet.42 Shabbetai had plans of his own, which brought him closer to Fazıl Ahmet. On 30 December 1665 Shabbetai and his followers took a ship from Smyrna for Constantinople, where he would establish his realm. A voyage out of season was risky, even within a short span of the Aegean, but the words of Psalm 107 were sufficient to calm the storm they encountered: ‘He makes the storm a calm so that the waves are still.’ He was at sea for nearly forty days. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire had gathered in vast numbers to greet him; but the Turkish authorities also awaited him. He was carried off to prison, yet even his journey into captivity was treated by his adherents as a great public procession; and, once in prison, he was still able to hold court. The sultan, Mehmet IV, was at Adrianople (Edirne) on the road into the Balkans, and it took a while for the prophet to be brought to the imperial presence. There, he was offered the choice between proving himself to be the Messiah through a miracle and converting to Islam. The miracle required was that Turkish archers should aim their arrows at his naked body, and that the arrows should pass miraculously through him without doing him any harm. Shabbetai demurred. He would rather ‘turn Turk’, and did so without more ado.43

  The apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi was all the more dramatic because the Jews of Adrianople had gathered to witness his arrival at the sultan’s court with such high expectations. Instead, he appears to have denounced his followers. He accepted the honorary office of keeper of the palace gates, and the name Mehmet Effendi. The shock to the Jewish communities of Turkey, Italy and elsewhere was immense. Throughout the Jewish world there were those who argued that all this simply proved he was an impostor, those who were deflated and discouraged by the course of events, and those who saw in his actions a further stage in his revelation to the world: maybe the Messiah must appear to turn Turk before finally revealing himself – some of his adherents followed in his path and accepted Islam, while keeping up their Jewish practices in secret, forming the Dönme sect that still persists in parts of Turkey. Even though a Jesuit writer insisted that Shabbetai kept a hoard of biscuits with which he fortified himself during his long fasts, there is no reason to suppose he was a rank impostor. He was self-deluded, megalomaniac and unwise, but even his opponents acknowledged that he and his advocate, Nathan of Gaza, were learned men.44 Still, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, and nowhere more so than in the esoteric universe of Kabbalah. His travels and the spread of the movement he founded reveal important facets of the networks that linked together the ports of the Mediterranean: from the trading base at Smyrna his ideas percolated to Salonika, Livorno and then into the Balkan and Italian interior. His ideas did not grow simply out of Jewish soil but were irrigated by the apocalyptic enthusiasm of Protestant merchants who had carried their ideas to Smyrna from England, Holland and central Europe. The northerners helped redraw the religious as well as the commercial map of the Mediterranean.

  III

  The seventeenth-century Mediterranean, with its renegade corsairs, its displaced Moriscos, its Sabbatian converts, its ‘Portuguese’ merchants, was therefore a place in which religious identities were constantly distorted and reshaped. Christian communities also experienced strong pressures, as the case of Crete illustrates. Here, the Venetians faced a long struggle to maintain control over their last major overseas possession. Crete was becoming a substantial financial burden to Venice, and the republic wondered when, rather than whether, it would have to send a massive fleet there to defend the island against the Turks, for the capture of Cyprus in 1571 would inevitably be followed by a Turkish assault on Crete. This was not simply a struggle with the Turks. The Cretans themselves – the descendants of both Greeks and Venetians who had intermarried with the Greek population – seized the opportunities offered by the wine and oil trades in the late sixteenth century to plant vines and olive trees across the island; by the middle of the seventeenth century olive oil had become the staple export of Crete, and Cretan wine slaked the thirst of consumers in the Ottoman Aegean and the Nile Delta. The production of grain fell to a point where Crete had difficulty feeding itself, a transformation all the more astonishing since it had long been a major source of wheat for Venice itself. The Cretans began to import their grain from Ottoman lands, which worked well enough so long as the Venetians continued to pay court to the Turkish sultan, and so long as the sultan did not feel that supplies were under strain within his own empire. Thus the ties between Crete and the Ottoman world were becoming closer even before the Turks acquired control of Crete in the mid-seventeenth century.45 The only reason the Turks tolerated Venetian control of Crete was the desire to keep business flowing between Venice and the Ottoman lands; but, as Venice gradually turned its face away from the Levant trade, the Sublime Porte became less interested in its special relationship with the Serenissima Repubblica. The Turks observed, too, that the European powers were all at each other’s throats during what became the Thirty Years’ War, and so there was little chance of a united Christian response to an assault on Crete. Moreover, the Ottomans were no longer distracted by war with Persia, which had consumed their energies between 1624 and 1639.46

  The casus belli for the lengthy Cretan War was the seizure, late in 1644, of a Turkish ship travelling from Constantinople to Rhodes and then on to Egypt, which was carrying the chief eunuch of the harem and the new judge of Mecca. The pirates were Maltese; they killed the chief eunuch and held the judge captive. They seized a vast booty. Even though the Venetians had played no role in the attack, the Turkish court insisted that the Maltese had been making use of Venetian ports in Crete and Kephalonia. By the end of June 1645, a large Ottoman fleet stood off Crete.47 The Christian navies of the western Mediterranean were duly mobilized, and a few ships were sent from Naples, Malta and the Papal States. Venice naturally made its own fleet ready, and the republic appointed the eighty-year-old doge as commander, but all these efforts were useless: over the next few months, the Turks captured the second and third cities of Crete, Chania and Rethymnon, as well as much of the interior.48 Fortunately for Venice, the capital, Candia, was stoutly defended by ditches, walls, fortresses and ravelins; this was state-of-the-art military architecture capable of resisting all that the Turks cared to throw at it. The broad strategy of the allies was to draw the Ottoman navy into engagements far from Crete and close to the heartland of the empire: the Dardanelles became a flashpoint early in the conflict, and from 1654 onwards several bitter engagements took place in which the Venetians tried to prevent Turkish fleets from entering the Aegean in support of the Cretan campaign.49 Still, the pressure on Candia grew, and by 1669 the situation had become critical. The Spanish king promised aid, which never materialized, because he was more worried about possible attacks from France than about the Turks. The French king did send aid, but his fleet was no match for the Ottoman navy, and a quick and easy naval victory by the Turks sent the allies scuttling away, leaving Candia exposed. On 6 September 1669 the Venetians surrendered the city and recognized Ottoman sovereignty over Crete; they also, typically, seized the chance to enter into a peace treaty with the Ottomans.50 It was obvious to the Venetians that a great epoch in their history had come to an end, for they had ruled Crete since the early thirteenth century. When they capitulated, the Venetian envoys stated: ‘We have come to surrender a fortress whose equal does not exist in the entire world. It is a priceless pearl the like of which no sultan possesses.’ Within hours a sultan did indeed possess it.

  The coming of the Ottomans did not effect a revolution in Crete.51 Candia became the centre of a regional trading network, while Chania, to the west, became the favoured port of international trade. Where Venetians had once traded, the French were very willing to replace them, exploiting their history of warm ties to the Sublime Porte. Even
with the spread of Islam in Crete wine production did not cease. Both French and Cretan merchants extracted sweet Malmsey wine, oil, dried fruits, cheese, honey and wax from the island; occasionally wheat was exported, notably when famine struck the opposite coasts of North Africa. The monks of the Arkadi monastery produced a ‘rich, racy, strong-bodied, deep-coloured’ wine with an excellent perfume, according to a French visitor writing in 1699. The Cretans meanwhile developed a taste they have never lost for coffee, which arrived from the Yemen by way of Ottoman Egypt, henceforth the main market for Cretan produce. Striking, too, is the emergence of native merchants, who had been pushed into a modest position under Venetian rule but had begun to assert themselves even before the Turkish conquest. This meant that there existed a solid base of local business expertise when the Turks took over the island, consisting of traders keen to keep Ottoman lands supplied with the island’s goods.52

  Greek sailors and merchants were becoming a more common sight, but in conquered Candia the majority of the merchants were Muslims. It would be easy to assume that the city had been repopulated, but most of these Candiote Muslim traders were in fact indigenous Cretans who had changed religion, not location. By 1751 Muslims owned nearly all of the forty-eight vessels that comprised the merchant navy of Candia.53 The ready acceptance of Islam throughout the Cretan towns is remarkable. The indigenous population ensured that the past was not obliterated: Greek, not Turkish, was the common language of the island, used by Muslims as well as Greek Orthodox. Cretans were cut off from regular contact with the Latin Church which in Venetian days had controlled the island hierarchy. The Venetians had banned Orthodox bishops from setting foot on the island, although Orthodox churches and monasteries continued to function under government protection – Cretan monks were admired beyond the island, and several became abbot of St Catherine’s in Sinai. The Ottoman conquerors exploited the opportunity to win support among the Orthodox, appointing an archbishop of Crete even before they had taken control of Candia.54 As important, then, as the coming of Islam to Crete was the reassertion of the primacy of Orthodoxy among those who did not adopt the new faith. Crete, with its close links to Sinai, became the centre for a revival of Greek Orthodoxy in the eastern Mediterranean.