Peace Be Upon You (29 page)

Not all who made the trip survived. Said one taciturn contemporary account, “A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans.” These transplanted Jews willingly shared their wisdom and learning with their new overlords, including knowledge about the arts of war. Jewish engineers and artisans helped the Ottomans manufacture advanced artillery
and complicated siege engines, which the sultan put to good use against the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The outcasts of Spain thus became an asset for the Ottomans.
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Some of the exiles moved to Istanbul, but the bulk settled in Salonica. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the city had a substantial Jewish population and had established itself as a metropolis that could stand proudly in the shadow of Istanbul. The Jews of Salonica were self-governing, answerable to the Ottoman governor and ultimately to the sultan but not to the chief rabbi in Istanbul. That began to change in later centuries, as the sultan ceded more authority to religious leaders in the imperial capital, which meant enhanced powers not only for the chief rabbi, but for the patriarchs of the Greek and Armenian churches as well. Initially, however, the Jews of Spain who settled in Salonica competed not with the Jews of Istanbul but with the older population of Greek Jews who had lived in the city for fifteen hundred years and had hosted Saint Paul on his travels through the Roman world spreading the gospel. These rivalries faded, though never completely, and with each passing century, the Jews of Salonica became richer, more powerful, and more central to the commercial life of the empire.

The illustrious history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire stands in sharp relief to the treatment of their brethren in Christian Europe until the mid-eighteenth century and of course during the Holocaust of the twentieth. The kingdoms of Europe cared greatly about the religion of their subjects and fought destructive wars in order to coerce belief and stifle heresy. The Ottomans were ruthless as conquerors but once they had achieved military victory, they preferred a lean and tranquil administrative system.

This tolerance may explain why few Christians and Jews converted to Islam during the Ottoman centuries, especially compared with the earlier rates of conversion in Andalusia or in the Near East, Egypt, and Persia after the coming of Islam in the seventh century. The presence of increasingly powerful Christian states in Europe, who represented the possibility, however unlikely, of a different order and a different regime may also have dissuaded Christians from converting. Other factors notwithstanding, the benign neglect of the Ottoman state allowed Jews, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Copts, and others to live in peace and security and to practice their beliefs unmolested. There are many reasons why the Ottomans were so successful and so resilient, but
perhaps the most important was that they gave people just enough autonomy to keep them content, loyal, and uninterested in change.

SULEYMAN AND THE APEX OF EMPIRE

MANY OF TODAY’S
inhabitants of the Balkans would dismiss the characterization of the Ottoman Empire as tolerant and relatively benign. Bulgarians, Serbians, and Greeks bear no affection for the Ottomans or for the Turks, and they recall an empire notable for its brutality and its ill treatment of them. The issue here is not whether the Ottomans were cruel; like most imperial powers, they could be. It is not whether individual governors took advantage of their power to steal, rape, and otherwise abuse their subjects. In their treatment of the peasants of the Balkans, however, the Ottomans were neither more nor less cruel than feudal lords in Europe were toward their peons. Some Ottoman governors were tyrants, others were not, and the ones who were tend to get the attention. There are many chronicles written by peoples that the Ottomans ruled that depict their masters in a very unkind light. Some of these highlight religion as the dividing line, but that does not mean that it was. The dividing line for the Ottomans was power, who had it and who did not.

The Ottomans did what was expedient. In today’s terms, they were realists, not idealists. Sultans from Mehmed on may have described themselves as holy warriors when they took the field against enemies, but when it came to governing, they were pragmatists to the core. The unspoken formula was beautiful and elegant: the empire was ruled by a sultan with nearly unlimited powers, answerable only to God and in theory to the
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, who almost always validated what he wanted to do. That included marrying Christians, employing Jews, and forging alliances with Catholic states—none of which were held to be incompatible with orthodox Islam as then understood.

The Ottoman bureaucracy, in turn, did not discriminate on the basis of religion or race. From the Janissary corps to the civil service to the palace eunuchs, the government was run by a motley collection of races. While becoming a Janissary did entail converting, there was often more form than substance to the Islam of the foot soldiers who fought the sultan’s battles so ably.

Tartars, Serbs, Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, Copts, Armenians, Jews, Sunnis,
Shi’ites, Druze, Nubians, Slavs, Bulgars, Hungarians, Georgians, and of course Turks combined to form a crazy quilt of languages, traditions, and rites. The Ottoman court in Istanbul and various provincial administrators also made use of Venetians, Genoese, Florentines, and Romans, as well as merchants and translators from France, Austria, Spain, and England. Not until the ruling class seized on the notion of “Turkishness” in the late nineteenth century was there anything particularly Turkish about the Ottoman state.

The sultans also viewed marriage through the lens of politics rather than race, religion, or love. Wives and the concubines of the harem came from a wide range of ethnic groups and multiple faiths. The goal was to bind the disparate groups of the empire to the sultan, and so he could hardly sleep with only Muslim women or only Turks. That in turn meant that most sultans—as the children of such unions—were of mixed ethnicity. The empire not only had a multicultural administration; it had a multicultural sultan.

The reality of the harem itself is at odds with the myth. The seductive mysteries of the harem became an obsession of Westerners who fantasized about lascivious nights, willing women, lots of silk, a surfeit of pillows, and black eunuchs with gold earrings and scimitar-laden cummerbunds. There was that, perhaps, though as the Western women who penetrated the harem later reported, there was much less sex and much more tea drinking and sewing. While one purpose of the harem may have been to gratify the sultan’s desires, the primary aim was to make sure that there was at least one male heir and that the pool of possible mothers reflected the diversity of the empire. It was, in that sense, a version of sexual democracy unburdened by concerns of race, class, or religion.

The willingness to ignore religion in order to focus on realpolitik defined the reign of the empire’s greatest sultan—Suleyman. Though he was known as “the Magnificent” in the West, his primary sobriquet in the Ottoman world was different, and telling. To his subjects, he was “the Lawgiver.” During his reign of more than forty years, the empire reached its apex. His conquests brought the Ottomans to the gates of Vienna in the West and deep into Persia in the East. All of North Africa came under his nominal control, and the last of the Crusader principalities, the demesne of the Hospitallers on the island of Rhodes, which had
resisted all challengers for more than two hundred years, fell after a long and gritty battle in 1526.

But while Suleyman led his armies to victory on the periphery, the core of the empire was peaceful, prosperous, and stable. After centuries of struggle, the Ottomans were able to consolidate their rule. Suleyman’s forty-six years in power were dramatic, but less because of external pressures than because of familial squabbles that turned deadly, as they often did among Ottoman princes. In most other respects, it was a placid and stable time. Suleyman formalized and codified the administrative practices that he had inherited from his father and grandfather, and for nearly three hundred years thereafter, his laws governed the state. During his reign, revenue flowed into the coffers in Istanbul; the Janissaries recruited their own version of the best and the brightest; provincial governors were dispatched from the capital to rule comfortably in the sultan’s name; and only the Safavid shahs of Iran to the east and the Habsburgs of Austria to the west prevented the Ottomans from extending their reach from China to the English Channel.

Every apex is also the beginning of decline. Suleyman’s armies achieved such rapid victories against the Hungarians in 1529 that they unexpectedly were able to advance up the Danube to Vienna. The army had not prepared for a long siege of the city, and was not equipped for winter. After weeks of stalemate, Suleyman, ensconced in a tent more opulent than many of the palaces of Europe, decided that it was more prudent to withdraw than submit his Janissaries to a winter campaign. The march on Vienna had been so easy that he imagined he could return again the following spring. Instead, it was a lost opportunity, and Ottoman forces would not seriously threaten the city again until 1683, when they would fail once more.

During these years, European diplomats and merchants had more contact with the Ottomans. Suleyman was an imposing, enigmatic figure, but he did grant audiences, and a number of diplomats wrote their impressions. Much of what they said reinforced the sense that the Ottomans, with Suleyman at their head, were utterly alien and brutally effective.

Regular diplomacy and occasional interaction did begin to peel away the mystique. In 1520, a Venetian envoy described a young Suleyman as “tall and slender, with a thin and bony face. The sultan appears friendly
and in good humor. Rumor has it that he… enjoys reading, is knowledgeable and shows good judgment.”
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He had the same aquiline nose as his great-grandfather Mehmed, and an even narrower face adorned with the sparse Ottoman beard favored by his family. That look did not change over the decades, though he grew paler and more sallow with the passing years. Toward the end of his life, the sultan received a perspicacious emissary named Ghiselin de Busbecq while “seated on a rather low sofa, not more than a foot from the ground and spread with many cover lets and cushions embroidered with exquisite work His expression … was anything but smiling, and had a sternness which though sad was full of majesty.” Suffering from gangrene, heavily made up, and deathly pale, Suleyman exuded a potent and painful combination of grandeur and tragedy.

He had every reason to be sad. His victories notwithstanding, his personal life was a shambles. He had broken the cardinal rule of the Ottoman ruling class and married one of his concubines. Sultans were not supposed to love the mothers of their children, but Suleyman did. She, in turn, used her position to champion her sons and turn her husband against the children of his other mistresses. The result was death all around. Suleyman ordered the execution of two of his sons, and another’s life ended under questionable circumstances. When his wife died, his two remaining sons by her turned on each other, and on him. He had yet another executed, along with several grandchildren, leaving only Selim, who would succeed him.

These dramas were duly recorded by the European envoys in the city. Much as the Roman emperors had combined an exquisite ability to rule the known world with dark and depraved family dramas, Suleyman and his heirs led lives rent by passions, intrigue, sex, and murder. While some of these stories fed the European imagination about the lascivious Turk, more to our point is that religion never entered the equation.

To wit: Suleyman commissioned the construction of a major mosque in Istanbul, the Suleymaniye. It was the most important Muslim monument of its day, but over half of the workers and artisans who built it were Christian. In addition, the sultan may have believed himself to be a devout servant of God, but as was true of the clergy in Rome at the time, such devotion didn’t preclude sin. The Medici and Borgia popes commissioned works of art, kept mistresses, and tried to ensure the well-being
of their many illegitimate children. The Ottoman sultans conducted themselves in a similar manner.

The absence of a rigid, doctrinal Islam was in stark contrast to the role of religion in the West. As the Ottomans drew closer to Europe, they held up the mirror to Western Christians who were descending into a long period of intolerance. Disgusted with the corruption of the Catholic Church, the German monk Martin Luther set in motion a chain of events that produced both the Reformation and decades of war in Europe. Luther viewed the Ottoman Empire under Suleyman as an exemplar of religious toleration. Though he did decry the Ottomans as “servants of the devil,” for Luther that was a mild critique compared to what he said about the pope and about Jews. Luther hoped that a reformed and purified church could one day emulate the Ottoman model.

Several decades later, the French philosopher Jean Bodin, committed though he was to his Catholic faith, wrote favorably of the Ottomans, “The great emperor of the Turks doth with as great devotion as any prince in the world honor and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors and yet detests he not the strange religions of others; but to the contrary permits every man to live according to his conscience… and suffers four diverse religions: that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Greeks, and that of the Mohametans.” Having lived through the wars of religion that were sundering Europe in general and France in particular, Bodin had witnessed the costs of intolerance. Protestants and Catholics regarded each other with contempt, hurling invective and promising punishment in this life and damnation in the next. The Ottoman Empire presented an alternative that Bodin could not help but admire.

The Islam of the Ottomans did not create obstacles to allying with Christian states, and Suleyman became enmeshed in the politics of Europe, not just as an adversary but as a strategic partner. Europe was cross-hatched with divisions, especially between Protestants and Catholics and between two royal families, the Habsburgs and the Valois, whose feud was acrimonious and intense. The Habsburgs ruled Spain, and under Charles V they governed the central European lands of the Holy Roman Empire as well. The Valois controlled France and posed a challenge to Habsburg hegemony. Under Francis I, the animosity
between the two families became personal. The two monarchs developed an abiding hatred for each other, which was based less on direct experience than on dynastic aims. But that did not make the hatred any less intense, and it led Francis I to court the enemies of the Habsburgs, no matter where they were or what God they worshiped.