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But we should not paint too rosy a picture of the city’s religious possibilities under Ottoman rule. Life was clearly better for some than for others. Muslims were in the ascendant, and the assertive Sefardic Jews, who dominated numerically, found their rule welcoming and were duly grateful. Mosques and synagogues proliferated as a result of official encouragement, and even the extraordinary episode of Sabbatai Zevi can be seen as illustrating the Ottoman state’s flexibility with regard to the Jews, who lived in Salonica, as a Jesuit priest noted in 1734, with ‘more liberty and privileges than anywhere else’.
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For the city’s Christians, on the other hand, Ottoman rule was very much harder to accept. The Byzantine scholar Ioannis Evgenikos lamented the capture of ‘the most beautiful and God-fearing city of the Romans’, and a sense of loss continued to flow beneath the surface of Orthodox life. After all, not even Saint Dimitrios, its guardian, had saved it from ‘enslavement’. Catholic visitors to the Greek lands often saw their plight as a punishment for their sins. So did many Orthodox believers. An anonymous seventeenth-century author pleaded in tones of desperation with the city’s saint:
O great martyr of the Lord Christ, Dimitrios, where are now the miracles which you once performed daily in your own country? Why do you not help us? Why do you not reappear to us? Why, St Dimitrios, do you fail us and abandon us completely? Can you not see the multitude of hardships, temptations and debts that crowd upon us? Can you not see our shame and disgrace as our enemies trample upon us, the impious jeer at us, the Saracens mock us, and everybody laughs at us?
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The small size of the surviving Orthodox population, its lack of wealth, and the constant erosion of its power left none in any doubt of its plight. The Byzantine scholars who had made its intellectual life so vibrant fled abroad – Theodoras Gazis to Italy, Andronikos Kallistos ending up in London – where they helped hand down classical Greek texts to European humanists. Within the city, while rabbinical scholarship flourished, the flame of Christian learning flickered tenuously through the eighteenth century. Such intellectual and spiritual discussions as were taking place within the empire were going on in the monasteries of Mount Athos itself, in the capital, or in the Danubian Principalities to the north. Salonica – the ‘mother of Orthodoxy’ – became a backwater. Bright local Christian boys usually ended up being schooled elsewhere. It is scarcely a coincidence that one of the best-known works to have been composed by a sixteenth-century scholar from the city, the cleric Damaskinos Stouditis (1500–1580), was a collection of religious texts put into simple language for the use of unlearned priests. Stouditis himself had been educated in Istanbul.
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First among the temptations that afflicted its Christians, of course, was Islam itself. During the prosperous sixteenth century, in particular, many poor young villagers flocked into the city from the mountains, and these newcomers soon formed a very large part of the local Christian population. Some of them, finding themselves adrift and vulnerable to the dangers facing those far from home, converted for the sake of greater security. Other converts were Christian boys apprenticed to Muslim craftsmen, or girls who had entered Muslim households as domestic servants: in both cases the economic power of the employers paved the way to conversion. But this was a dramatic step at the best of times and one which laid the individual open to unrestrained criticism from his relatives and community. Relatively few Christians (or Jews) with families in Salonica appear to have abandoned their faith. To judge from the mid-eighteenth century, which is when the first data became available, the overall numbers of converts were not great – perhaps ten cases a year in the city and its hinterland.
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Even so, Orthodox clerics were always deeply anxious about this. A monk called Nikanor (1491–1549) travelled in the villages to the west of the city, urging the inhabitants to stay true to Christ: ‘by his sweet precepts and the shining example of his virtuous conduct,’ we are told by his hagiographer, ‘he was able to hold many in Christ’s faith’ before retiring to the solitude of an inaccessible cave high above the Aliakmon river. Nikanor also built a monastery nearby, and in his will urged the monks to refrain from begging for alms without permission, not to mix with those of ‘another faith’ and to avoid seeking justice in Turkish courts, stipulations which suggest the extent to which monks and other pious Christians were usually interacting with the Ottoman authorities in one way or another.
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In fact, the very manner in which the Church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was brought within the Ottoman administrative system added to Christian woes. Patriarchs paid an annual tribute to the Porte and acted as tax-collectors from the Christians. When one sixteenth-century Patriarch toured the Balkans, Suleyman the Magnificent ordered officials to summon the metropolitans, bishops and other clerics to help him collect ‘in full the back payments from the past years and the present year in the amounts which will be established by your examination.’ In the early eighteenth century, the city’s kadi was told to help when it turned out that ‘Ignatius, the metropolitan of Salonica, owes two years’ taxes and resists fulfilling his obligations towards the Patriarchate.’ Fiscal and religious power were separated in both the Muslim and the Jewish communities [where rabbis were salaried employees of their congregations]; for the Orthodox they overlapped, damaging the clergy’s relations with their flock.
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The buying and selling of ecclesiastical favours and offices did not help either: in the seventeenth century alone, there were sixty-one changes of Patriarch. Most Metropolitans of Salonica had run up debts to get into office, and one of the earliest records to survive in the city’s archives is a 1695 Ottoman decree from the Porte on behalf of a Christian money-lender ordering Archbishop Methodios to pay what he owed him. The problem travelled down the hierarchy. One priest demanded to be paid before he would read the sacrament to a dying man; others were accused of taking payment to hear confession. The more their seniors took from them, the more the priests required.
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Money also explained the endless tussles between Salonica’s religious leaders and the lay council of Christian notables, the archons, which supposedly ran the non-religious side of community affairs. When the archons demanded control over management of the city’s charitable Christian foundations, the Patriarchate angrily told them ‘not to involve themselves in priestly affairs’. ‘There is order in everything,’ they were rebuked, ‘and all things in the world, heavenly and mundane, royal and ecclesiastical and civil, right down to the smallest and least important, have their order before God and before men, according to which they are governed and stand in their place.’ The message was simple: there was no way that ‘lay people’, whatever their motivations, would be allowed to ‘become rebels and controllers of church affairs’. Ironically, the main defence against the rapacity of the clergy were the Ottoman authorities themselves. In 1697 Salonica’s Christians complained directly to the Porte about the demands of their bishops, and the kadi was instructed to look into the matter. Twenty years later, their anger was so great that they even got the local Ottoman officials to throw one archbishop in jail until he could be removed.
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Three hundred years after the conquest, the city was still suffering from a dearth of priests, and lay figures regularly performed ecclesiastical duties. ‘Not many years ago,’ reports the Jesuit Father Souciet in 1734, ‘a lay figure married with children not only had charge of the revenues of the archbishop but acted even as a kind of vicar, giving the priests permission to celebrate and confess, and preventing them as and when he saw fit. I am not even sure he did not claim to be able to carry out excommunications.’ The underlying problem was economic, for until the commercial boom of the mid-eighteenth century, the Christians of the city were, on the whole, of modest means. Only a few descendants of the great Byzantine families still lived there; most were artisans, shopkeepers, sailors or traders.
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For them, faith was not really a matter of theology. Poorly educated, few could bridge the gap between the complex formal Greek of the church and the language of daily life, which for many Orthodox Christians was often not Greek at all, but Slavic or Vlach. ‘The priests and even the pastors – the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops – are extremely simple and unlearned men, who do not know the Hellenic language and have no explanations in the vulgar tongue, so that they don’t know and don’t understand anything they read,’ noted a visiting Ukrainian notable. ‘The people don’t know anything at all except the sign of the cross [and this not everyone]. When we asked them about the Our Father, they would answer that “this is the priest’s business, not ours.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes this uncertainty could be taken surprisingly far, as when a young Greek village priest asked whether Jesus was really God [though perhaps the questioner had been influenced by the scorn with which both Muslims and Jews treated such a claim].
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On the other hand, Salonica’s Christians were deeply attached to their traditional customs – especially fasting, about which they were extremely conscientious – and to the observance of local festivals, which were celebrated vigorously in the city and the neighbouring countryside, combining spiritual and commercial satisfaction. On Saint Dimitrios’s day a majestic service was attended by all the suffragan bishops. There was also a rapidly developing cult of Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century archbishop of the city, whose mystical and political views had made him a highly controversial figure in his lifetime. To the surprise of visiting Christians, who knew him for his much-disputed theology, his memory was revered as that of a saint and his mummified body, laid out on a bier, attracted increasing numbers of worshippers.
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Orthodox Christians were constantly reminded that theirs was a second-class faith: they were not allowed to ring church bells or even beat wooden clappers to bring the faithful to prayer. Yet so far as the Ottomans were concerned, they were a people of the Book and one distinctly superior to the Catholic Franks. During the long wars with both Venice and Austria, Catholic missionaries were accused of leading the local Orthodox astray, and introducing them to ‘polytheism, cunning and craftiness’. When an early eighteenth-century visitor discussed Christianity with one of Salonica’s mollahs, the latter told him ‘that the three faiths, the Papist, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist are the worst, while the Greek is better than all.’ According to him, many of the town’s Muslim scholars studied the Gospels in Arabic and valued the Greek Church above the rest because ‘the Greeks don’t depart from evangelical teachings and from church traditions and … they don’t introduce anything new into their religion or remove anything.’ The very conservatism denounced by visiting Jesuits was thus understood and appreciated by Muslims.
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This sympathy, however, had its limits. The primacy of the ruling faith was axiomatic, and any public assertion of the superiority of Christianity over Islam was punished with severity. But even here Ottoman and Orthodox interests fitted strangely together, since the church, itself founded through an act of martyrdom, regarded the public suffering of new martyrs as a way of demonstrating the tenacity of Christian belief. Priests or monks instructed would-be candidates who then presented themselves to the authorities, or carried out acts designed to lead to their arrest, dragging crosses through the streets, or loudly insulting Mohammed. Seeing apostates – in particular – return to the fold was, wrote one priest, ‘as if one were to see spring flowers and roses bloom in the heart of winter.’
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Those who died for their faith were the popular voice of spiritual protest – the senior church hierarchy, by contrast, were servants of the sultan – and their deeds were carefully recorded by monks at the time. Even today modern editions of these ‘witnesses for Christ’ circulate within the Orthodox world, with stories which are well worth reading for their unexpected insights into Ottoman religious culture. Like most Christians in Salonica, the city’s ‘neo-martyrs’ were humble men [and a few women] – a painter, a coppersmith, a fisherman, gardener, tailor, baker and a servant to take just a few of them. Michael, for instance, who was executed in 1547, was one of the many Christian immigrants from the mountains; a baker, he had got into trouble after chatting about religion with a Muslim boy who came to buy bread. Kyrill’s father died young and he was brought up by his uncle, who had converted to Islam. Alexandros, who also converted, had wandered the Arab world as a dervish, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca, before returning to his ancestral faith, and testifying – in the words that distinguished Christians from Muslims – that ‘one is three and three are one’. Although many of these martyrs had converted to Islam before seeing the error of their ways, what had induced their initial apostasy did not matter to the church – it might have been nothing more noble than the desire to pay lower taxes or to escape punishment for earlier crimes. All their sins were wiped out by their intention to repent and to testify to the superiority of the true faith.
Nor were all martyrs apostates. Some sought to emulate the martyrs of the early Church, or wanted to blot out the stain on the family name caused by the conversion of relatives. Aquilina’s mother had remained a Christian when her father had converted to Islam and brought shame on them. Nicetas was outraged when relatives became Muslims and he decided on martyrdom as a way of upholding the family honour. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land inspired one or two to follow in the footsteps of The Lord. In 1527 the noble Macarios, a monk on Mount Athos, became ‘completely consumed with the heartfelt desire to finish his life with a martyric death.’ He went into the streets of Salonica and began to tell a large crowd of Muslims about the teachings of Christ. Brought before the kadi, Macarios prayed that the judge might come ‘to know the true and irreproachable Faith of the Christians’ and ‘be extricated from the erroneous religion of your fathers by the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity’. His martyrdom followed.
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The path to death could be very dramatic indeed. An eighteen-year-old French convert to Islam repented of his apostasy, confessed to a Greek priest, and then – this appears to have been exceptional even among the neo-martyrs – put a crown of thorns on his head, a small cross round his neck, thrust small spikes into his limbs, and paraded in public, whipping himself and shouting ‘I was an apostate but I am a Christian’. He was arrested, rejected various attempts to get him to return to Islam, and was put to death. Christodoulos, a tanner, was so disturbed to hear of a fellow-Christian planning to convert, that he took a small cross, entered the tavern where the convert’s circumcision was about to take place, and tried to stop the ceremony. He was arrested, beaten and hanged outside the door of the church of Ayios Minas.
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Executions were as public as the celebrations which marked conversion itself. In fact vast crowds gathered to witness the last moments of the dying and to pick up relics of martyrdom. Following the Frenchman’s death, ‘the Christians took away his corpse and buried it with honour in a church’. Many people carefully collected drops of his blood and pieces of his clothing, just as they did with the holy remains of other martyrs: the Ottoman authorities respected this practice and made no attempt to stop it. When a young Bulgarian girl who spurned the advances of a Turk, died after being thrown into prison falsely accused of having pledged to convert to Islam, the guards noticed a great light emanating from the room, and were so struck by the miracle that they spread the news around the city. Once again, the clothes of the martyr were carefully parcelled out as relics.
Ottoman reactions generally ranged from bewilderment to anger. Officials considered would-be martyrs insane, and hence not responsible for their actions. Romanos was regarded as mad and consigned to the galleys the first time round. Cyprian was dismissed as a lunatic by the pasha of Salonica and having ‘reasoned that he would not receive the martyric end he desired at the hands of the Turks in that unbelieving city’ took himself off to the capital where by writing an anti-Muslim epistle to the grand vizier and having it specially translated into Turkish, he achieved the desired goal. The biographer of Nicetas recounts an extraordinary conversation that took place in 1808 between that would-be martyr and the mufti of Serres. After offering him coffee, the latter asked Nicetas if he had gone mad, coming into the town and preaching to Muslims that they should abandon their faith. Nicetas explained that it was only zeal for the true faith that motivated him, and he began to debate the merits of the two religions. Other Turks asked him if he had been forced to do this, and this too he denied. But the mufti only became truly angry when Nicetas described Mohammed as ‘a charlatan and a sensual devil’. ‘Monk!’, said the mufti. ‘It is obvious you are an ill-mannered person. I try to set you free, but by your own brutal words you cause your own death.’ To which Nicetas replied: ‘This is what I desire, and for this have I come freely to offer myself as a sacrifice for the love of my Master and God, Jesus Christ.’
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What is surprising in many of these accounts is how reluctant the kadis were to order the death sentence. They could be forced to change their minds by local Muslim opinion, but they must have been conscious of the power of religious self-sacrifice and unwilling to add to the list of victims. As it is, martyrdom was not a common choice, and the vast majority of Christians who converted to Islam evidently never returned to the fold. The hagiographer of the martyr Nicetas suggests that by the early nineteenth century a note of scepticism was beginning to prevail among Christians themselves. A Salonica merchant, he tells us, cast doubt on the merit of what Nicetas had done, saying ‘it is not necessary to go to martyrdom in these days, when there is no persecution of the Christian church.’ Only after a terrifying dream, in which a loud voice told him that Nicetas was indeed a true martyr, did he change his mind. Following British pressure in the 1840s, capital punishment for apostasy was abandoned, and the need for such dreams ceased.
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Sacred Geographies
In 1926, an eminent Albanian Bektashi sheykh, Ahmad Sirri Baba, stopped for a rest in Salonica during arduous travels which took him from Albania to Cairo, Baghdad, Karbala and back. By this point, the city’s Muslim population had been forced to leave Greece entirely as a result of the Greco-Turkish 1923 population exchange, and the tekkes had been abandoned. The sheykh’s journeys, as he moved between the worlds of Balkan and Middle Eastern Islam, were a last indication of channels of religious devotion which had once linked the city with extraordinarily diverse and far-flung parts of the world.
For centuries, Muslims from all over the Balkans congregated in Salonica to find a sea passage to Aleppo or Alexandria for the haj caravans to Mecca. Christians followed their example, acquiring the title of Hadji after visiting their own holy places. Others came to visit the remains of St Dimitrios before travelling onwards to the Holy Mountain. A Ukrainian monk, Cyril, from Lviv, arrived to raise money for the monastery in Sinai where he worked, and brought catalogues of the library collections there which he passed on to the head of the Jesuit mission in the city, Père Souciet, whose brother ran the royal library in Paris. For Muslim mendicant dervishes and Christian monks, the region’s network of charitable and hospitable religious institutions offered a means of permanent support, especially in the cold winter months when work and money were hard to come by. ‘One monk, almost a vagabond, came from Kiev to Moldavia,’ noted a Salonica resident who met him in 1727, ‘and from there wandered aimlessly through Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Venice, then returned from that unnecessary peregrination to Moldavia, and from there to the Zaporozhian Sich whence, by way of the Black Sea, he came to Constantinople and to Mount Athos.’
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In short, the city found itself at the intersection of many different creeds. Through the Sufi orders it was linked to Iran, Anatolia, Thrace and Egypt; the Marranos bridged the Catholicism of the Iberian peninsula, Antwerp and Papal Italy; the faith of the Sabbataians was carried by Jewish believers into Poland, Bohemia, Germany and eventually North America, while the seventeenth-century Metropolitan Athanasios Patellarios came to the city via Venetian Crete and Ottoman Sinai before he moved on to Jassy, Istanbul, Russia and the Ukraine, his final resting-place. Salonica lay in the centre of an Ottoman oikumeni, which was at the same time Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Perhaps only now, since the end of the Cold War and the re-opening of many of these same routes, is it again possible to calculate the impact of such an extensive sacred geography and to see how it underpinned the profusion of faiths which sustained the city’s inhabitants.
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* (#ulink_9e5ae8f7-1ea0-5e3e-9059-114e352b1605)Frank, a messianic figure in his own right, was a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Barouch Russo (see below).
* (#ulink_4865894e-fc00-5781-bb8a-30166107495d)In Hebrew, the term is Maminim; in Turkish Mümin. Ma’min was a Salonica derivation.
5 Janissaries and Other Plagues (#ulink_d1c07a40-1eff-5205-abe6-bde0ed78ff6b)
IF SCARCELY ANY BUILDINGS from Ottoman Salonica survive today, this cannot easily be blamed on the effects of war. Before the Ottoman conquest, the city had suffered one siege after another; after it, there were none. A visitor to the fortress vaults in the early nineteenth century found chests of rusting Byzantine arrows, their feathers worm-eaten: they were the long-forgotten remains of the ammunition left behind by the defenders of 1430. Every so often, hostile fleets approached the Gulf and on one occasion Venetian shells landed in the port. But apart from sporadic pirate raids, and a spot of gunboat diplomacy in 1876 which ended without a cannon being fired, that was all the fighting Salonica saw, before the Greeks marched in to end Ottoman rule in 1912.
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The early Ottoman rulers never imagined how little actual danger the city would face, and for three hundred years they kept the walls, gates and port in good order. Bayazid II wintered there. Suleyman the Magnificent built the White Tower at the end of the sea-wall, and another tower, now vanished, on the other side of the city. Both men were engaging the Venetians by land and sea, and Salonica was a crucial staging-post for their forces and a major manufacturer of gunpowder. They added batteries – like the ‘mouths of great lions’ – at key points, and a new fortress between the harbour and the land walls. The traveller Evliya counted a tower every five hundred paces, and spent five hours pacing the entire perimeter across the hilly ground. Each night, he writes, ‘the sultan’s music’ is heard within the walls, while the garrison patrols shout: ‘God is One!’ No houses were permitted to be built on the far side of the walls for security, and even today a tiny lane, barely a car’s width, sneaking round the outside perimeter past the shacks which cling to the steep northwest side of the ramparts, traces what is left of the invisible outline of this policy.
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But by the start of the eighteenth century, there were signs of imperial over-stretch. In 1732 a commissioner of the Porte reported that many of the towers were badly neglected. Within decades, the walls were of antiquarian interest only. An emissary of Louis XVI described the city as ‘of no importance’ from a military point of view – ‘an enceinte of ramparts without moats and badly linked, even worse defended by a very small number of poor artillery pieces.’ In 1840, the British army captain who drank sherbets and lemonade with the artillery commander found the troops excellent but the batteries ‘defenceless in themselves’. When the guns sounded, as they often did, it was to mark nothing more than the breaking of the Ramadan fast, the strangulation of a janissary or imperial celebrations.
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Until the demolitions of the 1870s, however, which got rid of gates, towers and entire stretches of the muraille, the ring of ramparts held the city tight – marking the boundary between residents and strangers, the living and dead. The claustrophobic airless warren of lanes within contrasted with the dreary expanses of open country – ‘a mournful and arid solitude’ wrote a nineteenth-century French visitor – on the far side of the walls, studded with water-mills, cemeteries, plague-hospices and monasteries. On the approach to the gates, the dangling corpses of criminals hung from trees to remind passers-by of the virtues of obedience. ‘We enter the Vardar-kapesi, or gate of the Vardhari,’ wrote the imperturbable Leake. ‘In a tree before it hangs the body of a robber.’ The gates themselves were manned by guards who checked the passes of non-residents and collected merchandise duties from farmers and traders. Come nightfall, tardy visitors were left outside, and everyone else kept in. The sharp sense of a division between city-dwellers and non-residents reflected the prevailing Ottoman conception of a close link between foreigners and crime. Vagrants, migrants and strangers were the cause of insecurity: the gates helped to keep them at arm’s length.
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For even if it was never itself invaded or attacked, in other ways Salonica was deeply affected by the numerous disorders which punctuated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With every campaign, rumours swept in: invading Austrian armies were coming down from the north, hostile Russian flotillas were just off Cape Caraburnu, a column twenty thousand strong of Napoleon’s troops was marching down from Bosnia. Wars against European states aroused the anger of local Muslims and jeopardized the position of the Christians. In 1715, during the war with Austria, the French consul reported that ‘terror has spread among the Greeks, who fear being chopped to pieces in their churches, and the Franks, who have a reputation for wealth, are worried about a population which does not reason and cannot distinguish between the French and the [Austrians] who are only five or six days’ march from us.’
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War also brought extra taxation to pay for new galleys, uniforms, and provisions. In 1702 the orders were for gunpowder, in 1714 biscuit and flour, and in the great campaign of the following year, which drove the Venetians out of the Aegean, the city contributed the equivalent of 40,000 sheep and 150,000 kilos of flour as well as workers to repair the roads and bridges along which the Grand Vizier’s army passed. In 1734 lead, powder, iron, medicines and thirty cannons were demanded, in 1744 pack-animals. By 1770, during the war with Russia, the Greeks were ‘so exhausted from constant requisitions that they don’t know how they will manage’. Yet seventeen years later, the Greek and Jewish communities were instructed once again to find two hundred ox-carts and three hundred camels – or the equivalent sum in silver.
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For many Muslims, war also meant military service, disrupting trade and family life for up to six months in the year. Town criers publicizing the sultan’s demand for extra troops found little enthusiasm. When decrees were read out in the mosques calling for volunteers, angry voices shouted that Greeks and Jews should enlist too. Most of Salonica’s seven thousand janissaries were liable to serve, but their commanders often claimed they could not be spared. In January 1770, an imperial decree called on all who believed in Mohammed to march on the Moldavians and Wallachians and to annihilate them for daring to rise up in rebellion against the Emperor. They were given licence to act as they would, and to take slaves.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet many preferred to give money and to shut themselves away in their houses. Another appeal for Muslims to enter the ranks explicitly allowed elderly and wealthy Turks, as well as the Ma’min, to make a monetary contribution instead. The city’s growing prosperity was creating new, more sedentary interests which clashed with the old ghazi warrior ideals.
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For troops levied in the hinterland, Salonica was a mustering point whether they were marching by land or sailing across the Mediterranean. The Grand Vizier’s 1715 campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese was probably the last time the imperial army as a whole gathered in its full glory outside the walls. But in 1744 at least 12,000 landed cavalrymen embarked there for the Persian campaign, and three thousand yürüks – settled nomads liable for military service – gathered from the surrounding villages. Albanian contingents from the mountains arrived en route to campaigns in the Crimea and Arabia, and so many men of arms-bearing age flocked to the city that north African recruiters and privateers combed it for volunteers: at least five hundred took the coin of the Bey of Algiers on one recruiting drive in May 1757 alone.
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Since there were no proper barracks, thousands of these unruly, poorly paid and ill-disciplined fighting men lodged in the city’s great khans and caravanserais. Their arrival invariably sent a shudder of apprehension through the town. In 1770, news that local levies might be ordered into the city provoked the Venetian consul to despair: ‘As soon as they enter the town, God knows what ill deeds they will perform and getting rid of them will be very hard.’ Made up of poor villagers, who associated towns with authority, judges and tax-collectors, these troops often found it hard to stomach the wealth they saw around them. In 1788, a levy of fifteen hundred men, destined for the ‘German’ front, ‘committed much disorder’ and the shops were closed for two months until they left.
Merchants and tavern-keepers were at greatest risk. In April 1734, to take a typical episode, the city was immobilized by the violent behaviour of Bosnian irregulars en route to Syria. As usual, wine shops and taverns were a magnet for trouble. In one they killed the owner, a baker and a Greek wine salesman. Others robbed the house of a Muslim woman, ‘raped her and tormented her cruelly until she died’. Armed with stones, knives, sabres and revolvers, they swaggered through the streets in gangs of as many as fifty, holding up anyone they met. ‘We are all locked inside our houses and well guarded until they depart for Syria,’ writes the Venetian consul. Even the Pasha remained in his palace, since he lacked sufficient troops to keep order.
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The Janissaries
Anyone of any wealth hired bodyguards, usually janissaries whose fearsome reputation and well-organized networks were usually sufficient to ward off troublemakers. Yet if eighteenth-century Salonica was what one resident described as a malsicura città, where one hesitated to travel except with an escort, and where one foreigner kept his own private priest at home to spare his family the unpredictable mile and a half journey to the church, the main reason was the unrestrained and increasingly arbitrary violence of the janissaries themselves. They guarded the city’s gates and towers, patrolled the markets to ensure fair trading, and were in theory at least one of the police forces of the Ottoman state. In practice, however, the fighting prowess and internal discipline of what had once been the mainstay of the Ottoman infantry had degenerated over the years until the chief threat they posed was to the inhabitants of the empire themselves.
As the janissary corps expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recruitment, which had once been through levies of Christian boys, became hereditary and very much less selective; membership was often transferred from father to son, or simply through the sale of the pay slips to which they were entitled. Their training had been so drastically cut that as Paul Rycaut, a well-informed English observer wrote in 1668, some ‘neither know how to manage a Musket, nor are otherwise disciplin’d to any exercise of Arms’. In the capital, they were renowned for their mutinous making and breaking of viziers and even sultans. As there is no question,’ Rycaut noted, ‘but a standing Armee of veterane and well-disciplined Souldiers must be always useful and advantageous to the Interest of a Prince; so, on the contrary, negligence in the Officers, and remissness of Government, produces that licentiousness and wrestiness in the Souldiery, as betrays them to all the disorders which are dangerous and of evil consequence to the welfare of a State.’
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In Salonica, the janissaries fell into two categories. There were the heavily-armed infantrymen, who formed the town garrison, a total of somewhere between 1200 and 2000 men. In addition, there were thousands more Muslim men and boys – mostly shopkeepers and tradesmen – who were enrolled purely nominally in one or other of the four local janissary companies. Although some of the officers controlled the customs house, the city gates, the tanneries, slaughter-houses, and the pasturing lands which they made available to shepherds when they brought their flocks down each autumn, official perquisites were distributed only irregularly by the Porte. Many janissaries enjoyed an uncertain living as bodyguards or fruit-sellers, and observers grouped them together with ‘poor Greeks and the Jews’ as ‘ordinary types who are obliged to make savings’.
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In their own minds, the janissaries were the protectors of the masses, the voice of hard-working Muslim artisans and traders, stepping in when the rich – be they landowners, Ottoman officials or Frankish merchants – tried to exploit the poor. Baron de Tott, a knowledgeable observer of the empire, saw them as the natural opponents of ‘despotism’. And it is true that whenever a sudden downturn in the market or a failure of the harvest threatened the city with starvation, the janissaries found themselves speaking for its consuming classes. The state was supposed to ensure the regular supply of affordable, high-quality daily bread, and it tightly regulated both prices and trade in grain and flour. But caught between the great land-owners, who controlled [and often speculated in] the local supply of grain, and the sultan’s civil servants, whose duty was to make sure enough food reached Istanbul, the poorer inhabitants of Salonica often needed the janissaries to defend them. Why should they starve solely to swell the profits of the wealthy, or to allow precious grain to be shipped to Istanbul? In August 1753 there was a ‘popular revolt’ as a janissary-led mob burned down the bakeries in the Frankish quarter, suspecting them of contributing to the scarcity of bread. Six months later, export of grain from the city was still forbidden. In September 1789 there was a far more serious uprising against the mollah and the mufti for allowing grain to be sent to the capital. An enraged mob went after the mollah, then dragged the mufti into the streets, beat him and shaved off his beard. Only the resolute action of the janissary agha, who ordered the immediate arrest and strangulation of the ringleaders, restored order.
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Yet the janissaries made unconvincing Robin Hoods. With their violent tempers, esprit de corps, rivalrousness and swaggering aggression they were as liable to fall on each other, beat up innocent Christians or ransack taverns as to worry about the food supply. ‘The government, properly speaking,’ wrote a visitor, ‘is in the hands of the Janissaries who act here like petty despots.’ They rarely had anything to fear from those above them for the pashas appointed from Istanbul came and went – sometimes three in one year – and often did not even bother to turn up at their new posting. The janissary agha himself often enjoyed only a nominal authority over the rank and file, and a prudent kadi would steer clear of trying to punish them: usually a few ounces of coffee were enough to buy him out of a guilty verdict. About the only voices they were likely to heed belonged to the senior men of their own company.
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To make matters worse, through the eighteenth century Istanbul was exporting its own janissary problem, as it expelled trouble-makers into the provinces. In April 1743 Salonica was witnessing ‘daily murders by Turks, either of each other or against Greeks and Jews’, and a janissary killed the kahya of Ali Effendi, one of the leading men of the city. Rabbis and bishops prayed to be rid of them; community leaders sent petitions to the emperor to take action against them.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1751 they were said to ‘rule’ the city, ready to kill ‘a man for a salad’. The following year, five hundred of them gathered to demand that certain particularly extortionate officials be handed over to them; when the janissary agha refused, they turned their fire on him. He managed to escape on a ship bound for Constantinople, but they then mounted a noisy guard outside the pasha’s palace, while others opened the wine shops and drank themselves into a stupor. Terrified by the violence which had already led them to three murders, everyone else kept off the streets.
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Yet their bitterest hatred was reserved for each other. In 1763 a good-looking young Jewish boy was seized by a member of the 2nd orta [company] and men from the 72nd were called in to help recover him. Clashes continued throughout the city for three days till the sultan ordered forty men from each company to be put to death, and the janissary agha demolished four cafés which the troublemakers were known to frequent.
(#litres_trial_promo) But although a determined pasha with his own men might frighten the locals into temporary obedience, janissaries could play at court politics too and often engineered the recall of officials they disliked. By the end of the century, the problem had become so bad that even the older janissary officers were losing control over the younger men. Salonica is ‘not a city but a battlefield,’ wrote the Venetian consul despairingly in March 1789. It remained that way until they were finally massacred by Sultan Mahmud II in ‘the auspicious event’ of 1826 which eradicated them forever.
Albanians
In the meantime, the remedy for janissary violence was often worse than the disease. Unable to rely on the troops supposedly under their command, many pashas kept armed retinues of their own. Mostly they recruited young Albanians from impoverished mountain villages, who brought with them an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life. An Ottoman traveller among them a century earlier had warned others what they might expect in the way of Albanian greetings and salutations. His list had included the following useful expressions: ‘Eat shit!’, ‘I’ll fuck your mother’, ‘I’ll fuck your wife’ and ‘I’ll fart in your nose’.
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Salonica lay between the southern Albanian lands and Istanbul, and by the mid-eighteenth century, several thousand worked there as attendants in the hamams, boza sellers, gunsmiths, stonemasons and bodyguards. Others found seasonal work as shepherds, or drovers. Most official entourages relied on them, and they provided the strength which enabled large land-owners [ayans] in the regions to the north of the city to accumulate more and more power for themselves. One redoubtable land-owner of Doiran, for instance, who had most of the pashas of Salonica in his pocket, was able to put three thousand Albanians into the field against his enemies – easily a match for the yürük troops whom the Porte ordered against him. Indeed many of the leading beys in the Macedonian hinterland were themselves of Albanian origin.
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The Ottoman authorities, with their fundamental dislike of migrants, were deeply suspicious of the Albanians (despite the fact that many of the most senior officials were themselves of Albanian descent). Exceptionally in an empire which recognized only distinctions of religion, they were singled out by name – arnavud – and in 1730 the emperor ordered all Albanians, both Muslims and Christian, to be expelled from Istanbul. Such measures simply intensified the problem in the provinces, increasing brigandage and crime, and slowly the government’s attention turned there too. After the long mid-century war with the Russians, when Albanian troops served the sultan in the Peloponnese, they continued plundering the Greek lands, until Sultan Abdul Hamid I, backed by his reforming admiral Gazi Hasan Pasha, decided to take action against them.
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To the French consul in Salonica at the time, they were more than a mere irritant. In fact, the stakes for the empire itself could not have been higher. As he wrote to Paris:
All men of sound sense here hope that the Capudan Pasha follows the example of Topal Osman Pasha who … covered Albania in rivers of blood on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud in 1731. Without this it is to be feared that this nation, which is very numerous and very poor at the same time, will abuse her habit of bearing arms and become powerful and dangerous for this Empire. All the open cities of Rumelia are exposed to its devastations, which could lead it to the gates of Constantinople, if some ambitious man knows how to profit from the number, the courage and the natural discipline of this nation.
Thus in 1779, the Ottoman admiral led a force of more than thirty thousand men against them. En route to the Peloponnese, in an operation impressive for its speed and brutal decisiveness, he personally decapitated two leading land-owners, and shot dead their main rivals: thirty-four heads were despatched to Constantinople and their lands were handed over to members of the Evrenos and other loyalist families. Hasan Pasha also gave the green light for Turks and Greeks to take whatever action they pleased against any Albanians they found: killing them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all the Albanians he encountered, setting fire to a monastery where others were hiding and offering five sequins for every Albanian head brought him. In Salonica the governor expelled more than four thousand within five days, including several hundred in his own entourage, and permitted only a few long-time residents to stay.
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This was only a temporary remedy, however, and it did nothing to reconcile the Albanians to Ottoman rule. Many of them were Muslims, but their shared religion could not override the contempt they now felt for the Turks. ‘The Albanians do not any longer recognize the authority of the Grand Seigneur,’ wrote an observer a few years later, ‘nor by extension that of the pasha of Salonica whom they regard as an odious enemy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1793 the pasha of Shkodra defeated an Ottoman army, captured several senior officers, and sent them back with their beards shaved to show his disdain for the sultan. In Salonica itself, they were soon causing trouble again. When the pasha attempted to arrest a known troublemaker called Alizotoglou in 1793, his house turned out to contain more than 150 of them, amply supplied with food and arms. The pasha, having called on ‘all true Muslims’ to come to his aid, used cannons to fire on Alizotoglou’s house, but his opponent only left the city after taking hostages for his security, and threatening defiantly to return with 2000 men if an official pardon was not forthcoming. A decade later, yet another edict had to be issued ordering local officials to clear the city of ‘an unknown number of Albanians and others belonging to the same category who are not fulfilling any service, without any proper occupation and who are gathering incongruously.’
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And, just as the French consul had predicted, much more powerful Albanian leaders did become a genuine threat to the empire. At the start of the nineteenth century Mehmed Ali, an Albanian soldier from Cavalla, became ruler of Egypt, founder of a royal dynasty, and creator of a short-lived empire in Africa and the Arab lands. Closer to home there was Ali Pasha – the ‘Muslim Bonaparte’ as Byron called him – who ruled the entire west coast of the Balkans from his Jannina stronghold. His writ ran almost to the gates of Salonica and nearby monasteries found he provided more effective protection against brigands than the city’s governor himself, supplying them with small handwritten notes written in ‘extremely bad Greek’ on ‘a small square piece of very dirty paper’, which threatened any Turk who maltreated the monks with execution. Here was an Albanian pasha building his own state and offering protection for the region’s Christians whose safety the sultan could no longer guarantee. There could be no clearer illustration of how fragile the authority of the Ottoman state had become.
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Prisoners and Slaves
The incessant struggles waged between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the Habsburgs, Russians and Persians, left their mark on the city in other ways. In August 1715, after the Venetians were driven out of the Peloponnese, six thousand Ottoman troops ‘dispersed into the regions of Larissa and Salonica, causing much harm along the road to the inhabitants of the country.’ The head of the city’s janissary corps was told to scour the area for ‘evil-doers’ and to imprison any he found. When more than one hundred Venetian deserters were rumoured to be making their way there, the town governor was so alarmed at the potential for disorder that he arranged for them to be seized and sold back to their commanding officers. Every campaign brought problems of this kind. In September 1769 – during the war with the Russians – it was reported that ‘the countryside was filled with deserters, ragged, killing.’
