Peter the Great (98 page)
But most of these young men entered the regiments of guards, the Janissaries. As boys, and later as soldiers, they lived all their lives in barracks, forbidden to marry or have children, so that their total devotion might be given to the sultan. In status, the Janissary was a slave; the barracks was his home, the Koran his religion, the sultan his master and fighting his profession. In the early centuries of the empire, Janissaries were like an order of fanatical military monks, pledged to fight the enemies of Allah and the sultan. They provided the Ottoman armies with a steely corps of superbly trained and dedicated infantry, superior to any military force in Europe until the advent of the new French army of Louis XIV.
A company of Janissaries made a colorful sight. They wore red caps embroidered in gold, white blouses, baggy pantaloons and yellow boots. The Janissaries of the sultan's personal guard were distinguished by their red boots. In time of peace, they carried only a scimitar, but when he went into battle, each Janissary was allowed to arm himself with the weapons he liked best: javelin, sword, arquebus or, later, a musket.
In the fourteenth century, there were 12,000 Janissaries; in 1653, a count produced 51,647. As the centuries passed, older Janissaries were allowed to retire, marry and have families. Moslem as well as Christian families begged to have their sons enrolled in the corps and, in time, the privilege was restricted to the children or relations of former Janissaries. The Janissaries became a free-born, privileged, hereditary caste. In peacetime, they took up trades, like the Streltsy. Ultimately, as with regiments of imperial guards in many countries, they became a greater danger to their own master than to his enemies. Grand viziers and even sultans rose and fell at the whim of the Janissaries until finally, in 1826, they were abolished.
Approached from the sea, the historic city of Constantinople seemed like an immense, flowered pleasure garden. Rising from the blue waters of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, its domes and minarets set amidst dark-green cypresses and flowering fruit trees, it was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Today, as Istanbul, it is vividly alive, but is no longer a capital; the republican government of Turkey, to cleanse itself of the city's sins, has removed itself to the austere, modern purity of Ankara in the center of the Anatolian plateau. But in the seventeenth century, Constantinople was the capital of the Moslem world, the military, administrative, commercial and cultural hub of the mighty Ottoman Empire. With a population of 700,000, larger than any city in Europe, blending many races and religions, it was studded with great mosques, colleges, libraries, hospitals and public baths. Its bazaars and wharves were piled with merchandise from every corner of the world. Its parks and gardens were filled with flowers and fruit trees. In the spring, wild roses bloomed and nightingales sang in the hedgerows.
Overlooking the great city from a high point of land where the Golden Horn separates the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmara was the Topkapi Palace, the seraglio of the sultan. Here, behind high walls, lay dozens of buildings: barracks, kitchens, mosques, gardens with bubbling fountains and long avenues of cypress trees bordered with beds of roses and tulips. A city within a city, existing entirely for the pleasure of a single man, the Seraglio made huge demands on the outside world. Every year, from all provinces of the empire came shiploads and cartloads of rice, sugar, peas, lentils, pepper, coffee, macaroons, dates, saffron, honey, salt, plums in lemon juice, vinegar, watermelons and, in one year alone 780 cartloads of snow. Inside this city 5,000 servants fulfilled the sultan's needs. The sultan's table was presided over by the Chief Attendant of the Napkin, assisted by the Senior of the Tray Servers, the Fruit Server, the Pickle Server and the Sherbet Maker, the Chief of the Coffee Makers and the Water Server (as Moslems, the sultans were teetotalers). There were also the Chief Turban Folder and the Assistants to the Chief Turban Folder, the Keeper of the Sultan's Robes, the Chiefs of the Laundrymen and Bathmen. The Chief of the Barbers had on his staff a Manicurist who pared the sultan's nails every Thursday.
Besides these, there were pipe lighters, door openers, musicians, gardeners, grooms and even a collection of dwarfs and mutes whom the sultan used as messengers, the latter being especially useful for attending the sultan during confidential moments.
Hidden through it was from the eyes of his subjects, the Seraglio was in fact but the outer shell of an inner, even more closely guarded private world,
the harem. The Arabic word "hare
m" means "forbidden," and the sultan's harem was forbidden to all but the sultan himself, his guests, the women who lived there and the eunuchs who guarded them. It could be approached from the Seraglio only by passing down a single passage through four locked doors, two of iron and two of bronze. Each door was guarded day and night by eunuchs who kept the only keys. At the end of this passage lay an intricate maze of luxurious apartments, corridors, staircases, secret doors, courtyards, gardens and pools. Because many rooms were surrounded on all sides by other rooms, light filtered down through stained glass in skylight domes and windows. In the royal apartments, the walls and ceilings were covered with intricate patterns in blue and green Nicean tiles. The floors were spread with glowing Turkish carpets and low sofas on which the inhabitants could sit cross-legged while sipping Turkish coffee and eating fresh fruit. In rooms where the sultan might wish to speak confidentially to an advisor, there were fountains so that the sound of running water would keep the wrong ears from hearing what was said.
The harem was a closed world of veils, gossip, intrigue and—at any moment of the sultan's choosing—sex. But it was also a world rigidly ruled by protocol and rank. Until the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, sultans had married; the Moslem religion permitted them four wives. But Suleiman's wife, a red-haired Russian woman named Roxelana, had interfered so much in matters of state that thereafter Ottoman sultans did not marry. The sultan's mother, therefore, became the ruler of the harem. The Turks believed that "heaven lay under the feet of the mother," that no matter how many wives or concubines a man might take, he had only one mother, who held a unique place in his life. Sometimes, when the sultan was young or weak, his mother issued orders in his name directly to the grand vizier. Beneath the sultan's mother ranked the mother of the heir apparent if there was one, and then the other women who had borne the sultan's male children. Finally, there came the odalisques, or concubines. All of these women, technically, at least, were slaves, and, as Moslem women could not be enslaved, it followed that all the harem women were foreigners: Russians, Circassians, Venetians, Greeks. From the end of the sixteenth century, most came from the Caucasus,
because the blue-eyed women of that region were renowned for beauty. Once she passed through the harem doors, a woman remained for life. There were no exceptions.
On entering the harem, usually at the age of ten or eleven, a girl was rigorously schooled in feminine charm by experienced older women. Fully trained, the hopeful girl awaited the moment of preliminary approval when the sultan tossed a handkerchief at her feet and she became "gozde" ("in the eye"). Not every gozde reached the supreme moment when she was summoned and became "ikbal" ("bedded"), but those who did received their own apartments, servants, jewels, dresses and an allowance. As all the women in the harem were totally dependent on how well the sultan was pleased, all were eager for opportunities to reach his bed and, once in it, desperate to please. So much so that several sultans, surfeited with endless days and nights of passion supplied by platoons of eager, adoring women, went, quite simply, insane.*
Into this private world of women, no male except the sultan was allowed to penetrate. So exclusive was the harem that, according to a Turkish saying, if the sun had not been female, even she would never have been allowed to enter. To ensure this exclusivity was the duty of the harem eunuchs. Originally, the eunuchs had been white, mostly brought, like the harem women, from the Caucasus. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the 200 eunuchs who guarded the harem were black. Most were bought as children in the annual slave caravans from the upper Nile and were castrated near Aswan as they came down the river. Ironically, as the Moslem religion forbade castration, the deed was performed by Copts, a Christian sect living in the region. These mutilated children were then presented as gifts to the sultan from his governors and viceroys in lower Egypt.
In theory, the eunuchs were slaves, and servants of the slaves who were the harem women. But the eunuchs often gained great power because of their proximity to the sultan. In the ceaseless round of court intrigue, the alliance of women and eunuchs could heavily influence the flow of favors and public positions. Eventually, the Chief of the Black Eunuchs, known as the Aga of the Women or the Aga of the House of Felicity, often played a great role in affairs of state, becoming tyrant of the whole Seraglio and sometimes ranking third in power in the empire, after the sultan and the grand vizier. The Aga of the Black Eunuchs always
*
Some of the Ottoman sultans kept boys as well as women in their harems. But while it is true that certain Turkish sultans had homosexual tastes, as did some Christian kings, most Ottoman sultans preferred women. The harem was overwhelmingly a reservoir of females.
lived grandly, having many privileges and a large staff which included a number of his own slave girls, whose duties, it must be said, are difficult to imagine.
Within the harem, as everywhere in his empire, the sultan was treated as a demi-god. No woman was allowed to meet him unsummoned. At his approach, those in his path had to hide quickly; one sultan, in order to give warning of his approach, wore slippers with silver soles to make a clater on the stone passageways. When he wanted to bathe, the sultan went first to his undressing room, where his clothes were removed by young female slaves; next to a massage room, where his body was oiled and rubbed; then to a bath chamber with a marble tub, fountains of hot and cold running water and gold faucets, where, if he desired, his body was washed, an assignment usually given to rather elderly women; finally, he would be dressed and perfumed, again by younger females. When the sultan wished festivity, he repaired to his audience hall, a large, blue-tiled chamber spread with crimson carpets. There, he sat on his throne while his mother and his sisters and daughters sat on sofas, and the ikbal and godze sat on cushions on the floor in front of him. If there were dancing girls and music, the court musicians might be required to attend, but on these occasions they were carefully blindfolded to protect the harem women from their eyes. Later, a balcony for the musicians was built above the audience hall, with walls so high that only the music could pass over.
It was in this audience hall that the sultan occasionally received a foreign ambassador. At these moments, he sat on his marble throne, wearing a long robe of golden cloth trimmed with sable and a white turban with a black-and-white aigrette and a giant emerald. Always, he sat with his face in profile, so that no infidel might gaze on the full countenance of the Shadow of God on Earth.
Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire remained a warrior state. All power lay in the hands of the sultan. When the sultan was strong and gifted, the empire prospered. When he was weak, the empire decayed. Not surprisingly, life in the harem, surrounded by adoring women and conniving eunuchs, took much of the fiber out of a race which had begun with warrior conquerors. A second circumstance tended, as the history of the empire unfolded, to degrade the quality of ruling sultans. Ironically, it had begun with an act of mercy. Until the sixteenth century, it had been an Ottoman tradition that, of the sultan's many sons, the one who succeeded to the throne would immediately have all his brothers strangled, to remove any threat to his position. Sultan Murad III, who ruled from 1574 to 1595, sired more than a hundred children and was survived by twenty sons. The eldest, succeeding to the throne as Mehmet III, strangled his nineteen brothers and also, to be certain of liquidating any possible competition, murdered seven of his father's concubines who happened to be pregnant. In 1603, however, the new sultan, Ahmed I, ended this terrible rite by refusing to strangle his brothers. Instead, to keep them innocuous, he walled them up in a special pavilion called "The Cage," where they lived cut off from all communication with the outside world. Henceforth, all Ottoman princes idled away their lives in this place, in the company of eunuchs and of concubines, who, to prevent the birth of children, were required to be beyond the age of childbearing. If, by mistake, a child was born, the infant was not allowed to complicate the royal genealogical tree by remaining alive. Thus, when a sultan died or was disposed without a son, a brother would be summoned from seclusion and proclaimed the new Shadow of God on Earth. Amidst this collecton of ignorant, unaggressive royal males, neither the Janissaries nor the grand viziers could often find a man with the intellectual development or political knowledge to rule an empire.
At all times, but especially when the sultan was weak, the Ottoman Empire was actually administered by the grand vizier. From a vast building erected in 1654 near the Seraglio and known to Europeans as the Sublime Porte, the grand vizier controlled the administration and armed forces of the empire—everything, in fact, except the Seraglio. In theory, the grand vizier was the servant of the sultan. His appointment was symbolized by his acceptance from the sultan's hands of a signet ring; his dismissal was signaled by the recall of this imperial seal. In practice, however, the grand vizier ruled the empire. In peacetime, he was the chief executive and chief magistrate. In war, he commanded the Ottoman army in the field, assisted by the Janissary Aga and the Captain Pasha of the Navy. He presided over his council, the Divan, in a large, domed audience chamber whose walls were adorned with mosaics, arabesques and blue-and-gold hangings. Here, on a bench circling the perimeter, sat the great officers of the Porte, the colors of their fur-trimmed, wide-sleeved robes—green, violet, silver, blue, yellow—denoting their rank. In the center sat the grand vizier, wearing a robe of white satin and a turban bound with gold.